Hi Karen, Am 18.10.2010 um 19:14 schrieb Karen Lofstrom:
Michael S. Hart wrote:
Why make it harder than it has to be? Why reinvent the wheel yet again? A simple search for even just three short words ...
Because you can't put "search for XXX" as a scholarly citation. True enough it is not a citation, but a away of finding the passage.
Pagination has been the old scholarly default, but it doesn't work if there is more than one edition of the book. Since when is pagination the default. I do not think that Shakespeare folios have pages or even earlier texts. One does not quote Chaucer by pages, nor ancient roman philosophers, nor drama, nor is the Bible. Besides how many Bibles and editions are there.
I should have expected that a community such as this, which contains no scholars and is often hostile to them (or should I be saying us? I'm an independent scholar, if not an academic), wouldn't understand.
Part of the solution has to be ebook readers and software that make displaying scholarly apparatus, such as footnotes and sidenotes, endnotes and references, as well as the suggested chapter and verse numbers, easy to do. Also making annotations, inserting notes, making links.
We'll get there eventually.
There are rules for citing webpages and editions. Having different ebook edition is not hard to cite. For a decent cite one mentions the edition, chapter and paragraph would be enough and is adequate. As far a scholarly citation is concerned a good scholar will only cite the original text and since there are not that many texts purely published as a e-text, a proper nomenclature has not been developed, yet. When the need arises I am sure a standardization for quoting ebooks will show up. regards Keith.