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Re: Bibliography: citing journal articles


Robin asked:
| Could someone with a 10-year memory of DocBook do their
| best to rehearse the origins of the "bibliography"
| model in the DocBook DTD?  Like: "it was based on NNNNNN".

Yes, it was real simple, then we added in Majour (revised
where it made sense), and nobody used it for ages.  When
I started to work on the bibliography for my book on
Islamic architecture 

  http://www.sonic.net/~tallen/palmtree/ayyfront.htm

I found handfuls of problems, which I think by now we
have fixed or have plans to fix.  If anyone's interested
in the Docbook source for the online HTML I'd be happy to
post it.

| The TEI encoding for bibliographic reference is
| (likewise) somewhat difficult to use in the general case
| because the TEI encoding perspective is (first and
| foremost):
| 
|   Having OCR'd this paper-print book with its formatted
|   bibliographic citations (in-text citations and bibliographic
|   reference list citations), *how* can I insert markup
|   between the characters so as to "tag" the formatted
|   bibliographic reference?
| 
| This isn't meant as a fundamental criticism of TEI, which has
| legitimate concerns, but a general observation that a
| bibliographic model designed for one goal often does not
| work well for the general case *IF* the design caved in to
| SGML's penchant to privilege the "raw" character stream.

I gave up on raw and went with cooked (bibliomixed).

| I am hopeful that with the rise of transform sub-languages,
| SGML/XML applications designers will become more willing
| to step back from this in order to model the information
| structure of re-usable objects like bibliographic
| references.   When done at the more abstract level, it
| should be possible to give better support to a number
| of different bibliographic perspectives that can emerge
| from the same data model (descriptive bibliography,
| enumerative bibliography, analytic bibliography, etc.).
| BiBTeX (rip-off of Reid's Scribe) made a good beginning
| philosophically, I think, but the model is very
| under-developed.

I wonder if bibliographic references aren't, over many
citations, as complex as the entries in the OED:  they
look consistent but require local variations because
publication information comes in many variations.  But
then I'm not a bibliographer.

regards, Terry


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