[Air-L] Citing from a Kindle

Gilbert B. Rodman gbrodman at mindspring.com
Tue Jan 4 08:11:36 PST 2011


Digital source or not, I think some sort of locator is still 
necessary/desirable for direct quotes.  I'm not sure why those should be 
an exception to Jeremy's love of page numbers (which I share, though I 
can imagine functional equivalents being used for paper-less sources).

If I'm actually trying to find a quoted passage -- because I'm curious, 
because I want to see the broader context from which the passage was 
pulled, because I want to cite the original source myself, because I'm 
shocked that such a passage exists in the work in question, etc. -- I 
don't want to have to hunt down the words in question in the middle of 
the full text.  To be sure, there are instances where this isn't a 
completely onerous burden: a 100-word passage from a 20-page journal 
article may be easy enough to find.  Still, the goal of a good citation 
is to help your reader find the precise source for the cited 
words/ideas, not just the general location where your reader can go 
hunting for them.

More to the point, that same passage will be much more difficult to 
locate in a 350-page book.  And a shorter phrase may not be possible to 
locate at all without actually reading the cited work straight through 
from start to finish.  To use a real example, if all an author tells you 
about the phrase, "the impossible science of the individual," is that it 
comes from Roland Barthes' /Camera Lucida/, you're probably not going to 
want to skim through the entire book to figure out where (or even if) 
that six-word phrase appears ... especially since, as far as I can tell 
from actually trying to chase down those words on the basis of a 
page-free citation, they dont appear in Barthes' text at all.

cheers
gil





On 01/04/2011 09:32 AM, jeremy hunsinger wrote:
> how about a group that centers on bibliography and citation much more closely, like MLA or IFLA or somesuch?
>
> as for page numbers, let me say this... if you submit a paper to a journal and it comes to me without them or some similarly recognized convention, I'm probably going to note that in the review and require it to be done, and I think any editor or reviewer would do the same.   As i said, i don't think you necessarily need them for direct quotes, and i think you don't necessarily need them in certain other common sense instances, but sometimes... for reference page numbers or other indexical values are necessary.   If a reviewer or editor can't find what you are talking about in a text, they should be... worried...  Currently then, the practice is to include them for due diligence.  Whether, that changes in our lifetime... i don't know, it could.  Should we reject it or change it, for my part, no.  I like page numbers immensely, they make my life much easier.
>
>> I disagree with the idea, however, that we should maintain page
>> numbers as a form of due diligence. There comes a time when we have to
>> get past horseless-carriage thinking, and recognize that when certain
>> communities are reading more off the page than on, it's time for a new
>> standard.
>>
>> And I'll be bold enough to suggest that AIR, as a group, is a perfect
>> place to come to consensus on that standard. Who better?
>>
>> Alex
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 10:01 AM, jeremy hunsinger<jhuns at vt.edu>  wrote:
>>> direct quotes are less of a worry than providing reference, I'd think.  One can search for a direct quote and usually find it.   However, if someone is referencing an idea, we really do need the exact page or location of the item in question.   My solution is simple, go to the library and find the page number.   That to me is just doing 'due diligence' as an author citing another's work.  I work primarily with e-books, usually in pdf format with page numbers, but when it is missing... I go to the library and look up the page number.   Sometimes i can also find it in google books or amazon books.   In short, that you have a gadget that transforms the text... that doesn't mean you should be using that gadget's lack of provision/affordance to not provide page numbers as justification for providing less useful/common information, as the reason for providing the citation is not for your use, but for the rest of the world who does not necessarily use the gadget that you have.
>>>
>>> For instance, I have transformed around 100 books into fragments and reconstructions for my own use, i keep them in slipbox.   They are still the 'books', but they are in a format that I use.   Should i be able to say... oh you should all use slipbox, it is slip 1754 in stack 5, downloadable here.   .... I'm guessing not.  Even if slipbox had a standard methodology and was used by 500k people, it isn't about those people, it is about the readers. So, please look up the page numbers if you can.
>>>
>>> granted, that in some scholarly topics there are unique citation traditions, such as in plato, aristotle, kant, etc. and one should stick with the tradition which is most commonly used centrally to the tradition, i'd guess.
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> Jeremy Hunsinger
> Political Science
> Center for Digital Discourse and Culture
> Virginia Tech
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