[Air-l] A note on (online) bibliography

[Douglas Eyman]

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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