Paragraph-Based Quotation in Place of PDF/Page-Based

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

In the online age, page/line-based quotation is obsolete (for 
current and forward-going text). Pages are and have always been 
arbitrary entities. A document's natural landmarks are sections, 
paragraphs and sentences. That is how quotations and passages 
should be cited, not by page numbers (though page numbers can be 
added in parens as a courtesy and curiosity, for continuity, for 
the time being, while pages -- and PDF -- scroll inexorably 
toward their natural demise).

It goes without saying that all quotations, citations and 
references should be hyperlinked. I am sure that XML documents 
will be tagged for section number, paragraph number and sentence 
number, so that it will be natural not only to pinpoint the 
passage to which one wishes to refer, but to hyperlink directly 
to it.

This answers, in passing, one faint concern about the 
self-archiving of authors' final refereed drafts instead of the 
published PDF: "How will I specify the location of passages I 
wish to single out or quote?" The answer is paragraph numbers 
(or, if you want to be even more precise, section numbers, 
paragraph numbers and sentence spans). They have the virtue of 
not only being autonomous and ascertainable from the document 
itself, but they are independent of arbitrary pagination and PDF. 
(It will also be useful for digitometric analyses.)

(I introduced this rather trivial and obvious online solution in 
Psycoloquy http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ in the early 90's, 
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Theschat/0037.html 
-- though I'm sure I wasn't the first -- and APA at last began 
recommending it in 2001: 
http://media.library.ku.edu.tr/refpgs/sociology/style_apa.htm )

http://www.google.com/search?q=harnad+%22paragraph+number%22+&num=100&hl=en&lr=&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2005-09,GGGL:en&filter=0

Stevan Harnad