Archival Material in MHRA

Mark Walmsley

I am attempting to cite archival material in MHRA style and have come across a few issues. Having looked at the forums and talked to friends I know that primary documents is a weakness of Zotero more generally, but I was wondering if people had any suggestions of useful work arounds. I like the idea I saw on another discussion of referring to the document in its original form (newspaper article, letter etc.) and then adding the archive and archive location. That person was using Chicago style I believe, but when I tried it in MHRA for a newspaper clipping the archive and archive loc. was not added to the footnote (which rather defeats the purpose).

The other method I was using is to refer to everything as a "document". The problem here is that some of my material is very date sensitive and in MHRA only the year of a document is shown. Furthermore, many of my pieces are newspaper clippings and there doesn't seem to be a way that I can introduce publication fields etc. in their correct formats so I have been putting everything in the title and then italicising afterwards. Up to now I have been citing clippings as follows:

Calvin Trillin, ‘Letter From Jackson, The New Yorker, 29 August 1964’, A.VIII.283, Slide 1054, The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers, 1959-1972.

Is there a better way of doing this?

Mark Walmsley

Using Standalone and have the most recent updates.

adamsmith

we can look at this in the style - I don't see a reason why archival information shouldn't be included for Newspapers (and magazines) in MHRA (as it is, I believe, for Chicago). Since the style is pretty elaborate I won't be able to do that quickly, though.

Mark Walmsley

Thanks, that would be much appreciated.

Mark Walmsley

In addition, letters do not seem to include the full date, but just the year as with documents. They do, however, include the archive and archive location so I don't know if they could be used as a simple template for changes to newspaper articles.

Mark Walmsley

Sorry if this is slightly off topic, but there appears to be another problem with letters under the MHRA style. When citing various letters by the same author only the author's last name is listed without any distinguishing title or date. Given the nature of my work this simply isn't acceptable and I'll have to completely change how I list these pieces if this is actually the established form. Can anyone tell me if this is the case, or if this is simply another slight bug with the code for the MHRA style?

adamsmith

probably a bug, I doubt someone has take a close look - could you provide an example?

adamsmith

I've now added archival information for many more item types, including books, theses, articles in newspapers and magazines etc.
Currently the style does _not_ print archival information for
type="article-journal bill chapter legal_case legislation paper-conference"
though all of those are negotiable - except perhaps for the legal types I don't see a strong reason against including archives for those.

I'm working on the letter disambiguation issue, but have unfortunately hit a glitch and will need to check with some people first. We'll make this happen for sure, though, adding dates for disambiguation.

adamsmith

OK, letters now print full date (let me know if there are any other item types for which that would be good - the manual isn't particularly clear on that) and for items without a title, subsequent citations will print a date for disambiguation.
Note that items with the _same_ title will not currently add a date for subsequent citations, we're not able to do that as of now, but I assume most of your letters either have no titles or unique ones?

Mark Walmsley

Thanks for all of your help on this. I've downloaded the most recent MHRA style and the problems with archival inclusion and letter date seems to be gone. If you were able to fix the letter title issue that would be amazing.

Once again, I'm very impressed with the speed and dedication that you guys sort these issues out!

adamsmith

You mean date for letters with the same title? That won't be anytime soon, that requires changes deeper in the code.

Mark Walmsley

Sorry, I meant title appearing in the short form when multiple letters are cited from the same author so the reader can distinguish between them.

edit: All my letters have unique titles so the problem you mention isn't really an issue (for me at least).

Mark Walmsley

For example, I have cited both of the following in my latest piece:

Cook, William, ‘Race Reporters’, 26 May 1964, Newsweek Atlanta Bureau Records, 1953-1979, Box 10 Folder 10, Manuscript and Rare Books Library, Emory University
---, ‘Telgram to Karl Fleming’, May 1964, Newsweek Atlanta Bureau Records, 1953-1979, Box 10 Folder 9, Manuscript and Rare Books Library, Emory University


However, although they appear properly on first use, the short form turns both simply into "Cook."

adamsmith

huh, that should work.
Could you select those two items in Zotero --> right-click --> Export Selected Items --> Zotero RDF (no note/files).
Then open the file with any text editor (TextEdit, Notepad...) copy the entire content and paste it as a public gist to gist.github.com & provide a link here

Mark Walmsley

I think I've found the problem. The second letter had a named recipient so Zotero therefore doesn't count the two letters as being from the same author (for footnotes, but it obviously does for bibliography given the example above). It looks like the latter piece actually appears as "Cook to Fleming" in short form, but I got confused as I couldn't tell which one I'd cited. I guess this is enough of a distinguishing feature by itself, although I think I'd prefer it to have a title as well in case readers aren't paying that close attention.

I've tried this out with a few other letters and when only the author is listed in more than one piece a title is provided.

adamsmith

OK, I'll leave this as is then. I understand why you'd want the title, but that's going to get impossibly messy.
I wonder, though, if the recipient shouldn't be in the bibliography? (the actual style guide doesn't provide much guidance here, so we're kind of making up something that seems plausible as we go).

Mark Walmsley

I think it could be useful if readers were able to cross-reference the footnotes with the bibliography, especially if they aren't reading a piece in its entirety. In that case, it would be better to have the recipient appear in the bibliography as well. If it would be a major hassle, however, then I'm not sure it would be really worth it.

adamsmith

OK, letter authors are added in bibliography. I took the code straight from Chicago:
It will default to
"Cook, William. Letter to Karl Flemming"
where "Letter" is replaced by the content of the "type" field if any.

Mark Walmsley

Seems good to me. Thanks again.

Mark Walmsley

Sorry to be a nuisance again, but I've noticed that Magazine articles also only display the year of publication rather than day and month in both footnotes and bibliographical references. Is there a way this also could be fixed?

adamsmith

The style is now fixed. The updated version will appear on the repository within 30mins (check the timestamp). Update your copy of the style by re-installing it from the repository. (See here if you need instructions for installing styles in standalone.)

Styles should also update automatically within 24hs for Zotero 4.0+

Any further problems please let us know.

Mark Walmsley

Sorry to be a nuisance, but I was wondering if it would be possible to add the full date to documents? This is rapidly becoming my default setting and it would be useful to be able to pinpoint the date more precisely than just year.

adamsmith

documents are a big hassle to handle. Couldn't you use Manuscript or Report?

Mark Walmsley

Manuscript has the same problem, but Report seems to work well enough. It italicises document title rather than putting it in quotation marks, but I think I can get away with that. Thanks for the suggestion.

adamsmith

I could add full date support for manuscript. It's just particularly burdensome for the document item type (which is why we general advise against using it too much). Would that be useful and make sense?

Mark Walmsley

That would be perfect.