I wonder, are academic citations obsolete in the presence of big data?
Why bother isolating a quotation and citing its source?
When machines have read everything written we can just ask them for the source of any though no matter how long, twisted and forked that province might be.
Authors enjoy some sway over their readers when they mischievously cite their friends. Why put up with that?
I say, let's leave this bookkeeping to computers and get on with putting ideas to work.
We may not even need big data. Federated wiki tags every paragraph at the point of creation. This makes a close approximation to big data possible with a few hundred lines of ruby script that anyone can run.