Dear Digital Medievalist,

This is part of a larger and older problem. For example, my Film Studies colleagues tell me that there is no standard way to point to a particular location in a film for reference purposes. Film scholars may use approximate timing references, and at some point in the production process film has very fine-grained timing information attached to it, but there is no standard pointing and reference system in wide use in scholarship, comparable to page references with paginated print materials. The reference system for music is better developed, since we can count measures, although I have no idea how one points to a moment inside an improvisational cadenza.

Closer to our electronic home, unless there is internal section numbering in the text or internal anchors in the html, there is no standard way to point to a particular location in a static web page comparable to a page in a book (even though the web page may be length of many, many book pages). We may be more aware of these limitations with Kindles and their ilk than we are with other media because we naturally think of them as a funny kind of book and we subconsciously expect to find the familiar book-like interface, complete with pagination, but fine-grained, reproducible location referencing may be more exceptional in the world of texts than we think.

Sincerely,

David J. Birnbaum (djbpitt@pitt.edu)

-----Original Message----- From: Patrick Gardella [mailto:pgardella@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2010 4:41 PM To: daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca; dm-l@uleth.ca Subject: Re: [dm-l] TAN: How does one reference a location in an electronic book on Kindle or iPad?

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