Of course this raises the problem of what kind of system is it where you've got to get the right delivery platform in order to find the reference, even if you have the same content on another platform. We never should have let them market PCs: it all went down hill from there.

On 10-10-06 02:55 PM, Barbara Bordalejo wrote:

Kindle locations are assigned automatically and they correspond to a predetermined number of characters. A particular word in a particular book, has a particular location independently of the font size (I just checked this). I only have one of my Kindles here, so I cannot check the consistency from system to system, but I suspect (and hope) that this would not vary. Locations vary, however, depending on the edition (in the same way that printed books have passages in different pages in different editions). A full bibliographic entry with the Kindle location should be enough for referencing purposes.

BB

On 6 Oct 2010, at 21:40, Patrick Gardella wrote:

...

At this point, there is no way to reference one specific location. Locations provide a way for Kindles, but the Locations will vary depending on the font size in use. So it will provide the individual with a way to reference something for themselves, but not for anyone else (arbitrary bookmarks that might come close to canonical).

This is one of the largest problems with ebooks and ereaders for scholarly work. Some body will need to define the standards for footnoting, and doing cross-references. To date, I have no heard of any such standards in the works. Perhaps others have.

Patrick Gardella Annapolis, MD

On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 4:27 PM, O'Donnell, Dan daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca wrote:

...

Hi all,

Good question from a student: if she is referencing a specific passage in a book on a Kindle that (apparently) has no pages or paragraph numbers, what does she do? She says Kindle has something called "locations" but it isn't clear to me if these are canonical or more like arbitrary bookmarks from how she is describing them (I don't have any ereaders, and so don't know).

Anybody know what you are supposed to do? I guess she could count paragraphs if it was that important, or, as with a very long webpage, just skip providing a location more precise than the entire work on the theory that you could full-text-search for it.

-dan

-- Daniel Paul O'Donnell Professor of English University of Lethbridge

Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/) Co-Chair, Digital Initiatives Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of America President-elect (English), Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (http://sdh-semi.org/) Founding Director (2003-2009), Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/)

Vox: +1 403 329-2377 Fax: +1 403 382-7191 (non-confidential) Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/

Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gidI320313760 Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gidI320313760 Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gidI320313760 Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

Indeed, my first thought is that we need to back to "old school" "section sign" (§) markings! I suppose these could be embedded but optionally made invisible (particularly in everyday fiction publications) to avoid freaking out the reader ....

Cheers, Carl

On 06 Oct 2010, at 16:38 , Welzenbach, Rebecca wrote:

I hope we'll ultimately move (revert?) to citing based on how the content is structured--chapter & verse, so to speak--rather than how any one device (including a particular edition of a book) displays it.

-- Carl Edlund Anderson mailto:cea@carlaz.com mailto:cea.unisabana@gmail.com mailto:carl.anderson@unisabana.edu.co http://unisabana.academia.edu/CarlAnderson http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/carl-edlund-anderson/ Department of Languages & Cultures UNIVERSITY OF THE SABANA Chía Campus Universitario, Puente del Común Bogotá, Colombia

IMO, the chief issue (although not the original question that launched the thread) is not whether it is possible to cite something with no pagination (or no date) -- because, yes, it always has been possible -- but whether there is a more useful way to cite current electronic publications that have some sort or another of "location" information already in them, as well as what would be useful ways to design (leaving aside the technical implementation considerations) the marking locations and/or sections in the contents in electronic publications without fixed pagination (because it is most useful to be able to use citation information to actually locate the contents to which the author intended to refer).

Cheers, Carl

On 06 Oct 2010, at 19:11 , NORMAN wrote:

There used to be abbreviations "np" and "nd" for 'no date' and 'no pagination'. Are those no longer in use ?

On 10/6/2010 5:00 PM, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:

...

Indeed, my first thought is that we need to back to "old school" "section sign" (§) markings! I suppose these could be embedded but optionally made invisible (particularly in everyday fiction publications) to avoid freaking out the reader ....

Cheers, Carl

On 06 Oct 2010, at 16:38 , Welzenbach, Rebecca wrote:

...

I hope we'll ultimately move (revert?) to citing based on how the content is structured--chapter& verse, so to speak--rather than how any one device (including a particular edition of a book) displays it.

-- Carl Edlund Anderson

-- Norman Hinton

Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=49320313760 Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

-- Carl Edlund Anderson http://www.carlaz.com/

All the more complicated when one realizes that some texts have been abridged (censored?) for Kindle or Nook. Worth noting! -R.C. Dr. Raymond J. Cormier "First Gent Emeritus" Longwood University-VA NEW ADDRESS: 237 Stable Rd. Carrboro, NC 27510-4144 TEL. 919-942-6746 http://www.longwood.edu/longwood/winter07/ http://www.longwood.edu/18176.htm ________________________________________ From: dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca [dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca] On Behalf Of NORMAN [normanhinton@sbcglobal.net] Sent: Thursday, October 07, 2010 13:56 To: dm-l@uleth.ca Subject: Re: [dm-l] TAN: How does one reference a location in an electronic book on Kindle or iPad?

Perhaps this occurs only in journals of literary scholarship -- but if I cite a recent reprint of a book or article, almost inevitably the editor or the readers insist that I go back to the original edition and make it the basis of my citations. I have always thought this was silly, as the more recent reprint may be the only available form in which most people can read the article -- but perhaps in the case of a Kindle edition, when it is actually an older print edition, one should seek out the original IF ONE CAN FIND OUT. I recently looked at a Kindle version of a translation of Aristophanes "The Knights", which Amazon advertised as "new". It was almost certainly not new, but there was no way at all of finding out where or when the print version had been done, or even who translated it. Amazon is doing no one a fvor with this kind of policy.

-- Norman Hinton

Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=49320313760 Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

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

I agree with Jesse: any referencing system we develop is going to have to be on the scholar side rather than the producer side, since the stakes are higher for us and we won't be able to rely on publishers or content designers doing the work for us.

An ideal solution would be that every producer put in a unique id at the beginning of every example of some agreed upon unit of text (paragraph or segment of so many characters, or whatever). But I suspect that counting paragraphs oneself is the only reliable way of doing this. Of course some canonical texts might well acquire common units (like chapter and verse).

In that sense, I think it is probably like why HTML took off, but the semantic web is much slower (even through Tim Berners Lee discusses both in his original memo). Not everybody cares about semantically rich data, so the lowest common denominator was simply "content in document with pointed brackets" not "content tied to a recognised ontological schema."

-dan

On 10-10-07 11:08 AM, Jesse Hurlbut wrote:

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, Rebeccarwelzenb@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

Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gidI320313760 Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

Digital Medievalist -- http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/ Journal: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/ Journal Editors: editors _AT_ digitalmedievalist.org News: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/news/ Wiki: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/wiki/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/digitalmedieval Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gidI320313760 Discussion list: dm-l@uleth.ca Change list options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l

There was a discussion of Kindle citation on Humanist recently, in which I expressed a view similar to Barbara's and someone corrected me, saying that locations are indeed consistent across devices (as long as the edition is identical). For the Humanist thread, start with http://lists.digitalhumanities.org/pipermail/humanist/2010-August/001482.htm...

Cheers, Sharon who reads Kindle-format texts only on Android

On Wed, 6 Oct 2010, Barbara Bordalejo wrote:

Kindle locations are assigned automatically and they correspond to a predetermined number of characters. A particular word in a particular book, has a particular location independently of the font size (I just checked this). I only have one of my Kindles here, so I cannot check the consistency from system to system, but I suspect (and hope) that this would not vary. Locations vary, however, depending on the edition (in the same way that printed books have passages in different pages in different editions). A full bibliographic entry with the Kindle location should be enough for referencing purposes.

BB

On 6 Oct 2010, at 21:40, Patrick Gardella wrote:

...

At this point, there is no way to reference one specific location. Locations provide a way for Kindles, but the Locations will vary depending on the font size in use. So it will provide the individual with a way to reference something for themselves, but not for anyone else (arbitrary bookmarks that might come close to canonical).

This is one of the largest problems with ebooks and ereaders for scholarly work. Some body will need to define the standards for footnoting, and doing cross-references. To date, I have no heard of any such standards in the works. Perhaps others have.

Patrick Gardella Annapolis, MD

On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 4:27 PM, O'Donnell, Dan daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca wrote:

...

Hi all,

Good question from a student: if she is referencing a specific passage in a book on a Kindle that (apparently) has no pages or paragraph numbers, what does she do? She says Kindle has something called "locations" but it isn't clear to me if these are canonical or more like arbitrary bookmarks from how she is describing them (I don't have any ereaders, and so don't know).

Anybody know what you are supposed to do? I guess she could count paragraphs if it was that important, or, as with a very long webpage, just skip providing a location more precise than the entire work on the theory that you could full-text-search for it.

-dan