Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 312.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu
[1] From: Mícheál Mac an Airchinnigh (40)
<mmaa_at_eircom.net> (by
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
[2] From: Matt Kirschenbaum <mgk_at_umd.edu> (4)
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
[3] From: Dino Buzzetti <buzzetti_at_philo.unibo.it> (14)
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
[4] From: Michael Fraser <mike.fraser_at_computing- (42)
services.oxford.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
[5] From: lachance_at_origin.chass.utoronto.ca (Francois (45)
Lachance)
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
[6] From: "Lisa L. Spangenberg" (13)
<lisa_at_digitalmedievalist.com>
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
[7] From: Arianna Ciula <arianna.ciula_at_kcl.ac.uk> (15)
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
[8] From: Alexandre Enkerli <aenkerli_at_indiana.edu> (29)
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
[9] From: Dennis Moser <aldus_at_angrek.com> (58)
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
[10] From: David Sewell <drs2n_at_virginia.edu> (22)
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
[11] From: "Ken Cousins" <kcousins_at_gvpt.umd.edu> (9)
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 06:11:34 +0100
From: Mícheál Mac an Airchinnigh <mmaa_at_eircom.net> (by
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
On 24 Oct 2004, at 09:09, Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard
McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>) wrote:
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 311.
> Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
> www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
> www.princeton.edu/humanist/
> Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu
>
>
>
> Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 08:59:37 +0100
> From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>
> >
>It occurs to me that the now common practice of citing URLs in printed
>articles and books, usually with the date of last sight, is unnecessary.
>
>Let's say the symbol "[*]" designates an online resource that may be found
>quite straightforwardly, say by a Google search, from the name of whatever
>precedes it. I contend that, for example, this:
>
>"See the Society for the History of Technology [*]"
>
>is at least as good as if not better than this:
>
>"See the Society for the History of Technology,
>http://www.shot.jhu.edu/
>(24/10/04)"
>
>In other words, should we not be able to assume now in at least some kinds
>of publications that our audience has the skills necessary to find an
>online resource when it is named unambiguously?
=====================================
Not all resources with urls will last forever.
It has happened to me this year that a resource has disappeared "forever".
At least I knew where it was and when it was last (sited/cited/sighted).
Technically, one could ask the ISP to track down the article/image/...
on their backups, given a date of sighting/citing/siting/...
A technological solution is given by persistent urls (purls) of resources.
See <http://purl.org/>
regards,
Mícheál
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 06:13:29 +0100
From: Matt Kirschenbaum <mgk_at_umd.edu>
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
>It occurs to me that the now common practice of citing URLs in printed
>articles and books, usually with the date of last sight, is unnecessary.
Willard, as I recall I suggested this very thing for our "Humanities
Computing and Institutional Resources" list at least a year ago.
:-) Matt
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 06:14:02 +0100
From: Dino Buzzetti <buzzetti_at_philo.unibo.it>
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
So why should we give bibliographical details when quoting from
a printed book? Shouldn't we able, in most cases, to find it
anyway, and sometimes even on-line? -dino buzzetti
> From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>
> >
>[...]
>In other words, should we not be able to assume now in at least some kinds
>of publications that our audience has the skills necessary to find an
>online resource when it is named unambiguously?
--
Dino Buzzetti <buzzetti_at_philo.unibo.it>
Department of Philosophy
University of Bologna tel. +39 051 20 98357
via Zamboni, 38 fax 98355
I-40126 Bologna BO
--[4]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 06:12:52 +0100
From: Michael Fraser <mike.fraser_at_computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
What may strike you as unambiguous now may not be so unambiguous to either
the present or future readers of your publication. Indeed, we could take
your argument further and suggest that, with the growth of union
catalogues and other online bibliographic databases, it should only be
necessary to specify a similar abbreviated reference for printed works in
the knowledge that anything worth reading will be indexed in Google or its
future equivalent. Furthermore, to help mitigate against the lack of
persistent URLs maybe all hypertext links on web pages should now be in
the form:
<a href="http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22Society for the History
of Technology%22&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky">Society for the History of
Technology</a>?
However, I don't feel so lucky. I believe references in any publication
serve to provide an unambigous record of sources consulted or used by the
author which enables, as far as is possible, for future readers to do
likewise ("show your working out", as Maths teachers still tend to say).
Whilst there may only be one Society for History of Technology appearing
on the first page of Google now, who knows how many there will be in ten
years time?
Whilst specifying the date of access may not seem to be very helpful for
readers (except to convey the implicit message, "Well, that's what the
site said on 24 Oct 2004, it's not my fault if that's no longer the
case."), at least it gives the potential for looking up the site on
services like the Internet Archive where there's a better chance of
reading what the author read. The issues are not much different from
problems we still encounter when authors fail to correctly cite the
particular edition of a printed work they read (maybe they just didn't
know other editions with different text or pagination existed?).
I'd rather we were encouraging students to provide rich citations to
printed and online resources rather than suggesting that it is, and always
shall be, found on Google in secula seculorum.
Best wishes,
Mike
---
Dr Michael Fraser
Co-ordinator, Research Technologies Service & Head of Humbul
Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 6NN
Tel: 01865 283 343
Fax: 01865 273 275
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/rts/
http://www.humbul.ac.uk/
--[5]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 06:14:27 +0100
From: lachance_at_origin.chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
Willard,
Citing URLs and dates is a good practice.
Electronic resources can change.
A blog or a journal can migrate to be housed under a different domain
name. Depending upon the speed of propagation and diligence of index
updates, hits offered by a search engine may return a link which when
activated results in a 404 (with or without redirect). See for example,
Planned Obsolescence
quote>
Oops. 404.
Planned Obsolescence has recently changed (1) servers, (2) URLs, (3)
blogging engines, and (4) filenaming conventions.
<quote
http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/archive/000103.php (accessed October
24, 2004, 10:00 EDT)
Citing date and sometimes time of access is useful. For example blog
author Kathleen Fitzpatrick (English and Media Studies, Pomona College)
may have, some time after 10'oclock of an autumn Sunday morning, changed
in the text that I quoted above, the numbers to reflect less and order in
a list and more the number of items [e.g. change servers 3x and
filenaming conventions 1x].
Your expressed the desire for shorter citations in terms of the audiences
skill:
> In other words, should we not be able to assume now in at least some kinds
> of publications that our audience has the skills necessary to find an
> online resource when it is named unambiguously?
In terms of time available to an audience, fuller citation is preferable.
In my reading, the URL and the date of access provide other information
that is useful for some types of research: sociology of knowledge and
networks of citation (e.g. which resources link to the cited URL); are
other earlier versions of the cited resource cached and available.
There is no determined "it" to find but versions to match. Even in the
zero degree case of a citation to textual object that has not been
modified or moved, date and time of access are interesting when compared
to the other access dates and times of the other citiations in the piece
that one may be reading (e.g. retracing the syntagm of reading (author
accessed (and possible read) an article on Kant before one on Plato but
the expository order adopted by the author places Plato first and Kant
later -- a rhetorical move aht may influence the readers perusal and
assessment of the argument).
--
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
A calendar is like a map. And just as maps have insets, calendars in the
21st century might have 'moments' expressed in flat local time fanning out
into "great circles" expressed in earth revolution time.
--[6]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 06:15:20 +0100
From: "Lisa L. Spangenberg" <lisa_at_digitalmedievalist.com>
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
Hi
Williard wrote:
>In other words, should we not be able to assume now in at least some kinds
>of publications that our audience has the skills necessary to find an
>online resource when it is named unambiguously?
Probably, but I'd also like the URL and date, in case the resource is
moved, or deleted. The date and URL makes it easier to find the resource in
Internet Archive or the Google cache, and the date serves much the same
purpose as the "second edition" in a printed resource citation.
Lisa
--
Lisa L. Spangenberg | Digital medievalist
Instructional Technology | http://www.digitalmedievalist.com/it/
My opinions are my own. | Who else would want them?
--[7]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 06:14:58 +0100
From: Arianna Ciula <arianna.ciula_at_kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
I do agree that the citation of the date can be redundant or
unnecessary in some cases. However, I reckon it will be a rather
relevant bibliographical problem to discriminate between ambigous and
unambigous cases, especially in a situation where advertisement and
continuous changes may vary the order of results in a Google search.
Moreover, how can we be sure that the procedures a research engine
applies to find online resources will remain the same?
Altough there is nothing surer in reporting the date fo sight, it
seems to me that there is at least a principle for recognising a
citation of an electronic resource as such. What we would need is
probably a better method to do the same.
Best,
Arianna Ciula
-------------------
Arianna Ciula
mailto:arianna.ciula_at_kcl.ac.uk
--[8]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 06:15:46 +0100
From: Alexandre Enkerli <aenkerli_at_indiana.edu>
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
Willard wonders if we really need URLs in print and whether that practice
could be replaced by an indication that a title can be searched, say
through Google.
A disadvantage of URLs is that many of them eventually change. We probably
all resort to searching when this happens. Yet, despite being somewhat
ephemeral, URLs and URIs still serve a purpose.
For one thing, URLs should be unique. And there is no way to predict that
the results of a Web search will remain unique.
Willard's example of "Society for the History of Technology" does return
the appropriate site as the first result of a Google search (using quotes),
but given changes in search technology as well as the nature of the Web,
who can predict that at one point, the "Finnish Society for the History of
Technology"[1] might not be the first result? For what it's worth, even
currently, that search returns 5,570 results in Google. An URL would
provide more information and might possibly help to disambiguate the results.
Not to mention that several URLs are quite informative. For instance, it
might be relevant to know that the SHOT site is, at press time, hosted at
"JHU" (John Hopkins) instead of UMich (Michigan) as it apparently was at
another point in time. And as in publication date for author/date formats,
date of access can be fairly relevant.
Clearly, the best solution would in fact be URIs and DOI addresses but when
these are not available, it seems that URLs are still more reliable than
searches.
Alex Enkerli, Teaching Fellow, Visiting Lecturer
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Indiana University South Bend, DW
2269
1700 Mishawaka Ave., South Bend, IN 46634-7111
Office: (574)520-4102
Fax: (574)520-5031 (to: Enkerli, Anthropology)
[1] http://www.ths.fi/thseng.htm or http://www.ths.fi/
--[9]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 06:16:16 +0100
From: Dennis Moser <aldus_at_angrek.com>
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
While it may be tempting to shorten the citation by NOT citing the URL and
counting on Google to provide a persistent pointer to the resource, it
would be a serious mistake.
Google is an entrepreneurial enterprise and, while certainly a successful
one SO FAR, it must still do its' own "search and discovery." The whole
point of URLs is that an entity is providing a persistent locater...or that
was the intent when the concept was developed with the Web by Tim Berners-Lee.
The fact that the search engines have become more efficient should not be
seen as an encouragement to move away from the structure that built the web
and are still effective.
No offense or slight intended, but to go the route of depending on Google
is an intellectual sloppiness that I would hate to see take on a wider usage.
The problem I see with citing URLs in printed material is that of aging
links ("link-rot"), which will also occur with the search engines. To avoid
this means that the creators need to take responsibility for the
persistence of their creations. Libraries and archives are increasingly
concerned with this issue and much work has gone into creating structures
to assist scholars and users.
I guess I see the Google approach as analogous to citing a printed
reference by simply giving a title and saying, "as available at your local
bookseller."
Dennis Moser
Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty
<willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>) wrote:
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 311.
> Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
> www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
> www.princeton.edu/humanist/
> Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu
>
> Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 08:59:37 +0100
> From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk>
> >It occurs to me that the now common practice of citing URLs in
printed
>articles and books, usually with the date of last sight, is unnecessary.
>Let's say the symbol "[*]" designates an online resource that may be found
>quite straightforwardly, say by a Google search, from the name of whatever
>precedes it. I contend that, for example, this:
>"See the Society for the History of Technology [*]"
>is at least as good as if not better than this:
>"See the Society for the History of Technology, http://www.shot.jhu.edu/
>(24/10/04)"
>In other words, should we not be able to assume now in at least some kinds
>of publications that our audience has the skills necessary to find an
>online resource when it is named unambiguously?
>Yours,
>WM
>[NB: If you do not receive a reply within 24 hours please resend]
>Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
>Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
>7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty_at_kcl.ac.uk
>www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
mailto:aldus_at_angrek.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief
danger of the time"
--John Stuart Mill (1806-73)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
--[10]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 06:16:55 +0100
From: David Sewell <drs2n_at_virginia.edu>
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
> In other words, should we not be able to assume now in at least some kinds
> of publications that our audience has the skills necessary to find an
> online resource when it is named unambiguously?
If I were writing an article in political science and wanted to refer to
"the White House website," presumably I would have some interest in
steering my reader to www.whitehouse.gov rather than www.whitehouse.org
as the appropriate online resource, rather than trusting his or her
ability to determine which is the authentic site and which the parody
(unhelpful hint: which one offers the deadpan observation that
"President George W. Bush's first term has been among the most
consequential and successful in modern times"?).
The special case here is generalizable. Until Internet publication is
uniformly subject to versioned archiving and unambiguous standard
identifiers, citing URL plus date of access is the most responsible way
of documenting online sources for readers.
David Sewell
--
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
Electronic Imprint, The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 400318, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
Courier: 310 Old Ivy Way, Suite 302, Charlottesville VA 22903
Email: dsewell_at_virginia.edu Tel: +1 434 924 9973
Web: http://www.ei.virginia.edu/
--[11]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 06:17:37 +0100
From: "Ken Cousins" <kcousins_at_gvpt.umd.edu>
Subject: Re: 18.311 citing URLs unnecessary?
While I admire the instinct for brevity, unfortunately urls will still be
necessary. The reason is that even monstrous efforts such as Google (with
4,285,199,774 as of today at 2:38pm) are estimated to index only 15-20% of
the total number of webpages.
The problem has as much to do with the "topography" of the internet, as
with its explosive growth. See Barabási's "Linked" (2003) for an excellent
overview of these issues.
Still, I do think we could all agree to enter only "www" instead of
"http://www" for webpages.
K
Received on Mon Oct 25 2004 - 01:43:41 EDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Mon Oct 25 2004 - 01:43:44 EDT