"Her Serene Highness" <mbuch@mcsp.com> writes:
David Starner writes:
What is he supposed to do, give a page reference to one of a dozen editions that might be very hard for the teacher to find? With etexts, you know that your recipent has access to the same edition you have. And as someone else pointed out, if you quote the sentence, the context can be found in seconds.
**Why not? It's done all the time. Students and scholars have cited rare books that are impossible to find before- I remember citing a rare book that contained the concordat between the Vatican and Germany for a grad class years ago, and information on the Black Star line of Marcus Garvey while still in high school. Why did my professors accept my citations? Because they could be tracked down.
One of the methods of mathematical proof is proof by uncheckable citation. "This lemma is proved in the January 1822 volume of the Bohemian Mathematical Journal, pages 12-43." If the volume is in some library half-way across the country, nobody is going to take the time to check a cite in some students paper. If the teacher is never going to check the cite, what's the point? And if he's going to find the one copy in the nation and order it via ILL, what's so hard about searching through an online document?
But other than as a work of literature, i'd have problems using it- like if I were comparing 19th century versions of Arabic texts, because I'm not even sure it was written in the 19th century.**
Anyone born in 1980 or later would know quite quickly, just like I do. It was translated in 1861 and reprinted in 1971 as part of the Everyman's Library, and has been frequently reprinted. It has a second edition, in 1871; assuming the Everyman's library's text was taken from the second edition, you can quickly check to see whether the PG edition is the first edition or the second edition. Google is your friend. So is the LoC catalogs, but watch out because they frequently have authors split under two headings, one of the marked as being from the old catalog.
**How? Easy. You look at other books about Koranic translations and see if they refer to this one- and guess what? You can't do that online. Which means you have to go to a library anyway. Online isn't BETTER. It's different.
Or I could do a search online and find out that Rodwell's translation is considered inferior by some because he wasn't a Muslim, but is probably one of the better public-domain ones. I also find "All the prominent translations of the Quran have each been the product of a single individual, so there is no translation which truly reflects the collective and opposing thoughts of a range of scholars. Such a large-scale collaborative effort would most likely be required to establish any one translation as most authoritative. Since this has not yet happened, there is no translation of the Qur'an as widely accepted (for example) as the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. "As a result, individual English-speaking Muslims tend to have their own personal favourites. Indeed, those who read more than one translation often develop a fondness for different aspects of each. For example, the renowned scholar Annemarie Schimmel, author of dozens of books on Islam and formerly professor of Islam at Harvard University, favoured the translation of Arthur John Arberry for beauty of expression, and that of Marmaduke Pickthall for literal rendering of Arabic phrases." which are from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation_of_the_Qur%27an>, and which convienantly have links to the authors so I can find their credentials.
By the way- in a library, I can tell if a book is a reprint.
But what you can't tell is if it was reprinted, if all you have is the original. A quick search through the LoC's online catalogs should give you a pretty reasonable guess as to whether it was reprinted or not.
I could print it out and share it with my friends- after all, most people don't read whole books online. Control F is only useful if I'm in front of a machine. If I want to read a Tom Swift book to my kids at a chapter a night, I'm not going to do it from a laptop or park little Johnny's bed next to my desk.
No, but you aren't doing scholarly work with Tom Swift. And again, your generation doesn't read whole books online, but mine does.
when I can print it out and have it paginated,
My printer _always_ paginates documents. If you're dealing with an old dot-matrix, you have to paginate it manually, but the paper is usually prescored for seperation. (-: But seriously, I can't imagine why you'd want that. The original pages were designed for the original machine, and the change in fonts and typesetting, which is unavoidable, will change where the page breaks would naturally fall even if you strive to keep everything the same as the original. It would be much better to put page numbers in the margins and let the physical breaks fall where they may. Accept that page numbers have become free of the physical form of the book. I think that we should retain source information, but you don't understand and accept the power of the tools at your fingertips. Much of the context about a book can be resolved in a google search or a search of the appropriate library catalog online. Stop and think before you hit that print button; ink is expensive, you know. A lot of things don't need printing out. Try emailing things to people, and letting them print it out if they want to. Ebooks don't need to dance to be useful. Even well-stocked libraries don't have many of the books we do, and even if you have to send for the hardcopy, having the book at hand is useful. It vastly simplifies searching and especially concordence building. Online books are better in many ways, not just different. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm