Citation in digital scholarship: Difference between revisions

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===1. Plain-text citatons===
===1. Plain-text citations===


Sample sentence: ''Herodotus (1.78) describes Babylon as the strongest and most famous city in Assyria. It is likely that this city was subsequently the mint from which Alexander issued a series of coins depicting eastern warriors, with elephants on the reverse (e.g. ANS 1995.51.68) as discussed by Martin Price (1991).''
Sample sentence: ''Herodotus (1.78) describes Babylon as the strongest and most famous city in Assyria. It is likely that this city was subsequently the mint from which Alexander issued a series of coins depicting eastern warriors, with elephants on the reverse (e.g. ANS 1995.51.68) as discussed by Martin Price (1991).''

Revision as of 22:37, 20 September 2010

This page provides examples and offers best practices for making citations in digital scholarship. The term 'citation' is meant very generally as the encoding of reference to an external entity in support of, as illustration of, or otherwise in relationship to a work of digital scholarship. Scholars cite resources ranging from primary texts, contemporary scholarship, museum objects, people, places, and a wide range of other entities and categories of information.

Some preliminaries:

  • The page is divided into categories of evidence with options for citing specific instances.
  • The structure of the examples presented emphasizes the practical solutions that are available now while leaving room for suggestion as to future directions.
  • An xml context – tei, xhtml, or other(?) - is assumed.
  • Discussion of this page can take place on the Digital Classicist Discussion List.
  • While this page does assert categories, those are also up for discussion. What is the theoretical and practical difference between a "primary source" and "secondary scholarship"? It is reasonable to cite the 9th century scholar Photius as both.
  • It is not the goal of this page to suggest that "Citation in digital scholarship" is a simple
  • For all the examples below, but particularly for sites creating stable id's (e.g. Pleiades), a concern is for a generic, interoperable, author-friendly convention to refer to those resources in ways that the sites themselves will recognize. "If you make a reference to Pleiades, how does Pleiades know that you've done so?"

Matteo Romanello (2008) has described goals for a linking system as:

  • open-ended: it should be possible to link and retrieve other resources related to a given author or work as soon as they appear on the Web. Each link would be resolved into an open-ended, and therefore potentially infinite, number of on-line resources;
  • interoperable: it should guarantee the reuse of data and the interoperability among web applications that use different communication protocols and interfaces;
  • semantic and language-neutral: such a linking system should allow to identify each author, work and edition of a work with a unique identifier rather than with a language-dependent name. If an author is univocally identified it is possible to map the name of the same author written in different languages to that unique identifier. But it is impossible to do the reverse.

The Process of Digital Citation in Prose Works

1. Plain-text citations

Sample sentence: Herodotus (1.78) describes Babylon as the strongest and most famous city in Assyria. It is likely that this city was subsequently the mint from which Alexander issued a series of coins depicting eastern warriors, with elephants on the reverse (e.g. ANS 1995.51.68) as discussed by Martin Price (1991).

Is it possible to establish a robust convention that allows unambiguous machine-recognizable linking to the cited text, to Alexander, to Babylon, to a description of the the coin in the collection of the American Numismatic Society and to the article "Circulation at Babylon in 323 B.C."?

2. Indicating the Presence of a Citation (@*="citation")

HTML: <span class="citation">Herodotus (1.78)</span>

TEI: Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; invalid names, e.g. too many

In both these usages, an xpath selector "//*[@*='citation']" will create a set of all the citations in a text. That is robust.

3. Normalizing the plain text citation

HTML: <span class="citation" title="Hdt. 1.78">Herodotus (1.78)</span>

TEI: Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; invalid names, e.g. too many

Normalization will assist tools that can automatically recognize plain text citations.

4. Deriving a Machine Recognizable "Cannonical Reference"

HTML: <a class="citation" title="Hdt. 1.78" href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0125:book%3D1:chapter%3D78">Herodotus (1.178)</a>

TEI: Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; invalid names, e.g. too many

Linking to Perseus provides access to the text. The URI in @href does not meet the requirement of being a persistent unique identifier for that chunk of text. A naming scheme that implements the Canonical Text Services (CTS) protocol or something similar is needed.

More complete markup

Extrapolating from the truncated steps above gives the following markup for the sample sentence:

HTML: <span><a class="citation" title="Hdt. 1.78" href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0125:book%3D1:chapter%3D78">Herodotus (1.178)</a> describes <a class="citation" href="http://atlantides.org/batlas/babylon-91-f5">Babylon</a> as the strongest and most famous city in Assyria. It is likely that this city was subsequently the mint from which <a class="citation" title="Alexander III of Macedon" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great">Alexander</a> issued a series of coins depicting eastern warriors, with elephants on the reverse (e.g. <a class="citation" href="http://numismatics.org/collection/1995.51.68">ANS 1995.51.68</a>) as discussed by Martin Price (<a class="citation" title="Martin Price. 'Circulation at Babylon in 323 B.C.' in Mnemata : papers in memory of Nancy M. Waggoner" href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/mnemata-papers-in-memory-of-nancy-m-waggoner/oclc/24342025">1991</a>).

Notes: The reference to the M. Price article is insufficient.

TEI: to come.

Adding other markup schemes to conformant citations

It should be possible to layer such schemes as RDFa onto/into markup that complies with the above convention. Discussion of that should go on its own page.

Categories of resources that can be cited

Ancient Mediterranean Primary Texts

"Classics" has well established abbreviations. Neither complete, nor unambiguous, but well established.

  • Plain text: "Hom. Il. 2.345", "Homer, Iliad 2.345"

The following examples illustrate that the same text can appear in different places.

None of these examples address the presence and/or capabilities of the Canonical Text Services (CTS) protocol and URN scheme under development at the Center for Hellenic Studies.

Geographic Entities

Within the Ancient Mediterranean, the Pleiades Project is establishing short URL as identifiers for geographic entities (but see their own discussion for details). Geonames.org is a worldwide list of identifiers.

Bibliographic Data

Worldcat. But there may be licensing issues.

What is the relationship between citing a work and citing its bibliographic record. Is that a necessary distinction. With some "skos", can we make the operation more clear.

The semantics here are along the lines of: a citation is being made to a work that is defined by the web page at "http.....".

Museum Objects

Or any cataloged object with stable id?

HTML: <a href="http://numismatics.org/collection/1968.34.40">ANS 1968.34.40</a>.

Same possibility to use 'skos:definition' here.

Egyptian Papyri

The sites http://papyri.info and http://trismegistos.org (e.g. http://www.trismegistos.org/tm/detail.php?tm=23 ) are islands of stability here.

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