Dating Problem: BC / AD

dpettegrew · October 9, 2012

I am wondering whether there are any plans / thoughts / hopes to resolve the BC / AD date dilemma (I have seen the other discussions).

I am an ancient historian who has used Zotero to create a library of about 6,000 ancient citations covering the period of 800 BC to 700 AD. It's a powerful library, but it cannot be sorted by time. Using the negative number for BC provides that potential, but the stand-alone version does not recognize -800 as 800 BC. For example, the citation for Herodotus, the 5th century BC historian, exports as "Herodotus. Historiae. Book 8 Section 46 Line 1. 450AD."

I have in mind eventually to use a tool like Paper Machines to analyze the trends in the texts associated with these citations--but I'm not sure how it will deal with the BC/AD divide.

Any hope for fixing this? Thanks.

. Some of tehse

Gracile · October 9, 2012

I am wondering whether there are any plans / thoughts / hopes to resolve the BC / AD date dilemma (I have seen the other discussions).

Progress have been made but nothing is implemented in Zotero: these dates are not recognized (parsed) at the moment.
As far as I'm able to understand,, Zotero might adopt the Extended Date/Time Format (EDTF) draft as the internal date format that is passed to the CSL processor.

adamsmith · October 9, 2012

does anyone know why this:
http://citationstyles.org/downloads/specification.html#ad-and-bc

The "ad" term (Anno Domini) is automatically appended to positive years of less than four digits (e.g. "79" becomes "79AD"). The "bc" term (Before Christ) is automatically appended to negative years (e.g. "-2500" becomes "2500BC").

isn't already working in Zotero? I don't see how that's limited by the Zotero interface.

dstillman · October 9, 2012

Zotero's date parsing doesn't support negative years, so those don't get passed to citeproc-js. Does the "AD" part work?

Gracile · October 9, 2012

I think the answer is here: https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/900

Now here: https://github.com/zotero/zotero/blob/master/chrome/content/zotero/xpcom/date.js#L467

Right?

adamsmith · October 9, 2012

no, AD doesn't work either.

Gracile · October 9, 2012

Does the "AD" part work?

No. e.g. "79" is not parsed by zotero.

Gracile · October 9, 2012

(however "790", i.e. three digits, is parsed but AD is not appended by the proc)

Gracile · October 11, 2012

Dan: I discovered today, completely by accident, that when you enter three digits (only from 100 to 499) in the date field, "AD" is appended, e.g. "100AD".

fbennett · October 11, 2012

I'm sorry for the surprise. This should either be documented or avoided for consistency. What would be the best behaviour?

Rintze · October 15, 2012

@fbennett, the CSL specification contains the following language on AD/BC:

The "ad" term (Anno Domini) is automatically appended to positive years of less than four digits (e.g. "79" becomes "79AD"). The "bc" term (Before Christ) is automatically appended to negative years (e.g. "-2500" becomes "2500BC").
http://citationstyles.org/downloads/specification.html#ad-and-bc

fbennett · October 15, 2012

Ah. I'll withdraw that apology, and replace it with one for not checking the specification before responding!

Dani_Bodor · December 30, 2014

Hi,

is the BC function still not working yet, or am I missing something here? If I input negative numbers, it is still read as positive.

aurimas · December 30, 2014

No changes in date handling yet