The addition of standardized location markers sounds pretty great, but getting everyone to do it (or to follow any given standard) seems pretty optimistic--especially retroactively.
In the end, don't we use search queries to find text these days? It's particularly easy if the text is a word-for-word quotation (you can even misspell it). That's not to say that it's enough to satisfy academic purposes to simply write "Bible" or "Shakespeare" in your footnote and let the reader google the quote to figure out which book, chapter, verse, play, etc. A good footnote also provides contextual information--sometimes it matters to know which editor, year of publication, etc.
But if you're only worried about being able to locate the passage of an electronic text, mark-up is slow, search is fast.
Jesse Hurlbut
On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 6:55 AM, Welzenbach, Rebecca rwelzenb@umich.edu wrote:
Dear Norman,
Of course! But one would never cite p. 47 of the Bible or of the Aeneid--or indeed, probably any work that was well known before the age of print (just as Heinrich Kuhn illustrates in his message).
For works born in the print era, and especially those locked down by copyright to one edition at a time with a single publisher, page numbers have always seemed natural and convenient. But as more and more works appear in many different formats all at once, and where print is just one of many ways to access a work, it's apparent that a page number is no longer necessarily the most reliable, or even useful, citation. I think that in a post-print age (by which I mean not a world without print, but a world where print is one of many options) we'll eventually begin to cite all works as we already do works for which "no standard edition exists (or which is available in many manuscripts)"
Best,
Rebecca Welzenbach
On 10/6/10 8:14 PM, "NORMAN" normanhinton@sbcglobal.net wrote:
Don't blame the technology! I blame print culture, for convincing us that tying a piece of information to an absolute physical location is normal and necessary. The proliferation of devices and systems right now is just opening our eyes to the fact that this isn't the case
Have you never wanted to look up a citation and read its context ?
-- Norman Hinton
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