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

[Peter Banks <pbanks@bankspub.com>]

An interesting observation.

So scientific literature is now adopting the system of Stephen 
Langton, 11th century Archbishop of Canterbury, who first placed 
chapter divisions in the Latin Vulgate to facilitate Biblical 
citation.

As you know, the breaking of text into chapter, paragraph, or 
verse is not without controversy. The present New Testament 
verses were introduced by Robert Stephens in his Greco-Latin 
Testament of 1551. His verses were criticized because they broke 
the text into fragments, the division often coming in the middle 
of the sentence, rather than at the end of a logical paragraph. 
Nonetheless, his system persists.

Thus I suppose in scientific citation we might get to the level 
of the phrase, as in the 6th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew: 
"(44) But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who 
persecute you, (45) that you may be sons of your Father in 
heaven." We might even approach citing one or two words, as in 
"Jesus wept" (JN 11:35).

Perhaps the Archbishop of Canterbury will be kind enough to 
divide the gospel of the Journal of Biological Chemistry for us. 
He would have the requisite training.

Peter Banks
Banks Publishing
Publications Consulting and Services
pbanks@bankspub.com

On 10/27/06 7:02 PM, "Stevan Harnad" <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

> In the online age, page/line-based quotation is obsolete (for 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