Comments are welcome! [[ http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/method/note-on-bibliography 2006 Oct 20 | A note on bibliography I'm sharing this note from the beginning of my dissertation so others working with online resources might comment. The type and number of bibliographic sources of this work merit a couple comments. First, most of the primary sources are online, and have only been online. Quotations from e-mail and most exclusively online resources have no page numbers associated with them. Second, many of the printed sources (primary and secondary) are now online. This is common in recent works where authors place versions of a print publication online, or where older works are now in the public domain and have been republished online. In such cases I use the publication date of the version I used. If necessary, I include the original publication date in prose adjacent to the reference, and I include it in the title of the work in the bibliography. For example the bibliographic entry for Project Gutenberg's 2004 republication of H. G. Wells' "A Modern Utopia" would be: Wells, H. (2004). A modern utopia (1905). (6424). Retrieved on September 20, 2006 from < http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/mdntp10h.htm >. The page numbers associated with print-only sources obviously correspond to the printed page. For those sources that are also online, the page number might be associated with the pagination of the printed online resource from which I first took my notes, or the printed material, for which I later found an online copy. I believe it will be clear to the reader which is the case. Third, for some recent sources, there are many publications by the same author in the same year. After a couple of years of experimentation with the software I use to manage this material I have settled upon the convention of identifying such a source by appending a token to the publication year that is composed of the first three substantive words of the title. So, instead of using the letters [a-z], which some bibliographic systems use, my reference for Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" article is: (Wikipedia 2006npv). This provides stability across additions/subtractions to the bibliography and across chapters, and is comprehensible to the author and hopefully the reader. Finally, Web sources do change, particularly Wiki pages! Wherever possible I include the date of the version of the resource to which I am referring. Wikimedia resources are also identified by their versioned, "stable" or "permanent," URL. It is possible that I will reference different versions of the same Wiki page. All of this may sound confusing, and it was no easy task coming to this understanding, but in the end I hope it is useful. If the intention of bibliography is to permit the reader to follow the author's journey through the sources, the ready accessibility of online resources is a boon to all. ]]
Den 20. okt. 2006 kl. 16.13 skrev Joseph Reagle:
First, most of the primary sources are online, and have only been online. Quotations from e-mail and most exclusively online resources have no page numbers associated with them.
The MLA style (http://www.mla.org/style) suggests that for unpaginated material, you state the paragraph number, counted from top. Styles are a matter of academic discipline, and something often not under your control. I tend to prefer MLA as it not only has specified how to cite almost all kinds of communication, but also because it avoids the necessity for year-and-letter constructions (2004a), and you stay clear of obviously anachronic constructions like "_Rhetoric_ (Aristotle, 1989)." --anders -- Anders Fagerjord, dr. art. Associate professor, Department of Media and Communcation, Unversity of Oslo P.O. Box 1093 Blindern N-0317 OSLO Norway http://www.media.uio.no http://fagerjord.no
Anders, I thought your take on citation styles was interesting and it prompted a (slightly rant-y) response: I've been thinking about bibliographic/citation styles lately as well and I ended up preferring APA style for two main reasons: MLA style is based on the premise that written scholarship is immutable and timeless (this comes from the literary studies tradition) and that the author (assuredly in the Foucauldian sense) is more important than the context (cultural, temporal) in which the work was published. APA privileges that timeliness of the work, and generally is more usable for citing online references. For unpaginated online material, for instance, counting paragraphs makes far less sense than using the find or search function of the browser (MLA does not take into account the actual differences in print and digital interfaces to texts). I don't see myself counting paragraphs so I can say that, for instance for a lengthy online document, the quote appears in paragraph 71. Does the reader then have to count the paragraphs to get to the quote if they he or she goes to the source? MLA bases its style on print publication models and does not bother to try to understand that digital models are *different* (this is the problem I have with the MLA in general, as well as most writing handbooks, composition textbooks, and instructional materials that try to approach digital works as if they are really the same as print works, just accessible online). Doug Anders Fagerjord wrote:
Den 20. okt. 2006 kl. 16.13 skrev Joseph Reagle:
First, most of the primary sources are online, and have only been online. Quotations from e-mail and most exclusively online resources have no page numbers associated with them.
The MLA style (http://www.mla.org/style) suggests that for unpaginated material, you state the paragraph number, counted from top.
Styles are a matter of academic discipline, and something often not under your control. I tend to prefer MLA as it not only has specified how to cite almost all kinds of communication, but also because it avoids the necessity for year-and-letter constructions (2004a), and you stay clear of obviously anachronic constructions like "_Rhetoric_ (Aristotle, 1989)."
--anders
-- Anders Fagerjord, dr. art. Associate professor,
Department of Media and Communcation, Unversity of Oslo P.O. Box 1093 Blindern N-0317 OSLO Norway
http://www.media.uio.no http://fagerjord.no
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On Friday 20 October 2006 11:21, Douglas Eyman wrote:
For unpaginated online material, for instance, counting paragraphs makes far less sense than using the find or search function of the browser (MLA does not take into account the actual differences in print and digital interfaces to texts). I don't see myself counting paragraphs so I can say that, for instance for a lengthy online document, the quote appears in paragraph 71
Indeed, it took me some experimentation to conclude that reader paragraph counting doesn't work well. (Though some publications of secondary sources will number paragraphs or provide section numbers that I will use.) In an e-mail, what counts as a paragraph? (Consider weird line breaks and nested quotations in a message.) In a webpage? (Do I count pairs of the <p> elements even if empty? What about <br/>?) I even wrote a local CSS stylesheet that numbered <p> elements [1]; and realized this was not reliable given the different browser implementations and that other readers would not have this stylesheet in any case! The tricky bit of citing online works is that the change, finding text is easy enough as you say. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/generate.html#counters -- Regards, http://www.mit.edu/~reagle/ Joseph Reagle E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65 BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E
On Friday 20 October 2006 10:24, Anders Fagerjord wrote:
Styles are a matter of academic discipline, and something often not under your control. I tend to prefer MLA as it not only has specified how to cite almost all kinds of communication, but also because it avoids the necessity for year-and-letter constructions (2004a), and you stay clear of obviously anachronic constructions like "_Rhetoric_ (Aristotle, 1989)."
Yes, my crunching of the title into an abbreviation serves a similar purpose (e.g., Wikipedia 2006npov). However I would not go the MLA route for historic and ethnographic archival work because the titles of the resources would be ungainly, and it would be ambiguous in the end regardless if I'm quoting multiple messages in the same thread by the same author. -- Regards, http://www.mit.edu/~reagle/ Joseph Reagle E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65 BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E
participants (3)
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Anders Fagerjord -
Douglas Eyman -
Joseph Reagle