What color is your paratext?

Abstract

How do we judge "trustworthiness" in a world where content is protean, provenance is vague and identity is cheap? Even Tim Berners-Lee hints that we may be facing an epistemic crisis when he says: "The Web was originally conceived as a tool for researchers who trusted one another implicitly; strong models of security were not built in. We have been living with the consequences ever since." The fundamental challenge for scholarly librarians and publishers is to create a new epistemic infrastructure that allows different audiences (e.g. scholars, professionals, politicians and ordinary citizens) to more easily evaluate and judge the trustworthiness of the content we we are responsible for. This talk will propose some concrete steps that librarians and publishers can take (both individually and collectively) in order to create a new class of heuristic tools to help readers identify trustworthy content online.