[Air-L] Inclusion of short links in academic publications?

[Joseph Reagle]

On Friday, July 22, 2011, yana breindl wrote:
> The reason I asked is not because of a word limit but because one of my
> committee members suggested I'd use short links to ease access for readers
> of the print dissertation. I do have quite a lot of electronic sources as
> footnotes in some of the chapters and he mentioned he'd have typed a
> shortened url but not a long one.

But typing in random strings of digits -- even if shorter -- can be a pain too.

> An alternative would be to include short urls in the footnotes and add an
> appendix with corresponding long links. I'm not sure it's worth the hassle
> though.

Or, just put the bibliography online. (I imagined that would much easier than typing in URLs).

Since so many of my URLs are from WP, I used the short form of those and others URLs in the printed version, but long one's in the online one. For example:

http://reagle.org/joseph/2010/gfc/bibliography

http://en.wikipedia.org/?oldid=289128389 -->
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikipediholic&oldid=289128389