Title/Subtitle GUI

bwiernik

I'm wondering about the best way to distinguish between titles and subtitles in the Zotero GUI, given the various issues related to capitalization and other formatting that have recently come to light.

The current method is to algorithmically determine the subtitle based on differences between the Short Title field (which is assumed to hold the main title) and the Title field (which is assumed to hold both the main title and subtitle). In general, this works, but I'm not sure it's especially intuitive, and it has two main issues.

First, it precludes use of the Short Title field where that ought to be something other than the main title, for example in legal cases and in sources without authors cited in APA style:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/41300/allow-sort-by-short-title/#Item_9
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/45796/display-column-short-title/#Item_4

Second, it doesn't support items that have container titles, volume titles, series titles, etc. Here, separate Short Title fields would be needed for each of these other titles in order to have them format correctly (otherwise they would need to be stored in whichever capitalization scheme is needed to be cited correctly).

It seems like the most efficient method, GUI space-wise, that would also fit all situations, would be to make all Title fields adjustable with single-field and main title-subtitle modes, similar to the Last-First and single-field modes for name variables.

For translators, rather than sending the part of the title before a colon to the Short Title field, it would put this in the main-title field and the rest in the subtitle field. While this won't be perfect all the time, I think it would be accurate just as frequently as the current method.

While this would increase the complexity of the code for titles, I'm not sure if there is a better way to accommodate the various title formatting needs in an easy-to-understand mannner. When the two field are not needed, the single-field mode would conserve GUI space.

fbennett

The suggestion to use " : " may still have something going for it.

aurimas

Could someone summarize or link to some documentation about special handling of title and subtitle?

From what I understand, there is sometimes a need to drop the subtitle and capitalize the first word of the subtitle differently based on style (is the requirement specific to subtitles or just in general for words after colon, dash, etc). Is there anything else I'm missing?

Basically, this boils down to whether separating title and subtitle by colon, em dash, period, or some other punctuation is insufficient or ambiguous and if there needs to be a special way to indicate the separator. I can, for instance, imagine an em dash being used to separate a title from the subtitle, but an em dash can also just be part of the title. In the case where it is used as a separator, is it important to preserve it as the separator? (i.e. when displaying the full title, should an em dash be used or can it be replaced by a colon?)

Is it really necessary to worry about subtitles for other fields? Are there actually special requirements for these in style guides?

adamsmith

From what I understand, there is sometimes a need to drop the subtitle and capitalize the first word of the subtitle differently based on style (is the requirement specific to subtitles or just in general for words after colon, dash, etc). Is there anything else I'm missing?

That's the most common use case. There are, as far as I'm aware, four different types of capitalizing titles in English:
1. US title case (e.g. Chicago Manual): Everything but prepositions and articles gets capped and the first word of the subtitle gets capped even if it is an article/preposition.
2. UK title case: Same as US title case, but the first word of the subtitle doesn't get capped if it's an article or preposition
3. APA sentence case: Proper nouns and the first word of the subtitle gets capitalized.
4. Vancouver sentence case: only proper nouns get capitalized.

There are other use cases, in particular specific rules about title/subtitle delimiters e.g. in German: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/8077/separate-fields-for-title-and-subtitle/ with long&helpful discussion, including potential issues.
I'm currently more concerned with the different capitalization rules, but would at least like to keep the other issue in mind.

Is it really necessary to worry about subtitles for other fields? Are there actually special requirements for these in style guides?

Not special rules, but likely the same ones as for titles.

Basically, this boils down to whether separating title and subtitle by colon, em dash, period, or some other punctuation is insufficient or ambiguous and if there needs to be a special way to indicate the separator.

especially once we go international, I fear the answer is yes. Colon for subtitles is mainly a US convention. Colons get used differently in other countries. Periods are a mess anyway--just think about abbreviations.

bwiernik

And the presence of a colon doesn't always indicate a Title/Subtitle separation.

For example,
Correction: "Gray and green: Age differences in pro-environmental behavior"
(The title would be [Correction: "Gray and green] with the subtitle [age differences in pro-environmental behavior"], so that "Age" would be correctly capitalized in both APA and Vancouver capitalization schemes.)

adamsmith

Thanks, that's a useful example, but this

so that "Age" would be correctly capitalized in both APA and Vancouver capitalization schemes

isn't right. age would be lowercase in Vancouver.

bwiernik

"Correctly capitalized" i.e., Uppercase in APA, lowercase in Vancouver

Sorry for the lack of clarity

aurimas

Correction: "Gray and green: Age differences in pro-environmental behavior"
(The title would be [Correction: "Gray and green] with the subtitle [age differences in pro-environmental behavior"], so that "Age" would be correctly capitalized in both APA and Vancouver capitalization schemes.)

This doesn't sound right to me. How can you split a title/subtitle in the middle of the quote. It seems that here you have nested title/subtitle. title1 = "Correction", subtitle1 = "Gray and green: Age differences in pro-environmental behavior", title2 = "Gary and green", subtitle2 = "Age differences in pro-environmental behavior". Splitting where you indicate in Zotero GUI would be very odd.

Considering only capitalization, basically what you want is a way to indicate where a subtitle begins. I think your example clearly shows that splitting into separate fields is not a good solution and some in-field markup is more appropriate.

Edit: fixed title2

bwiernik

That's a reasonable point, though I admit the example is a corner case. Something more like "Editorial: Data analysis in behavioral genetics: intervals and estimation" is probably more common.

My big concern with using something like " : " as in-field markup for the separator is that I'm not sure it's very intuitive. I don't think many users would understand why the field looks like that on import and would probably "correct" it or be confused.

aurimas

Do you mean specifically "<space>:<space>"? I thing going with a more natural ":<space>" would be better. The concern is, of course ambiguity. My suggestion above, though, is to introduce invisible markup (only visible in edit mode). In the general view mode, the text could be styled differently for title/subtitle. (I'm thinking a bit ahead when we do get a better Info pane that is styled more naturally).

As far as export/import goes, that's pretty much a lost cause. I doubt that we can come up with any markup that would gain wide adoption and I'm not aware of anything like that existing in BibTeX, RIS, etc. We would just end up exporting the title as displayed (without the markup). We could maintain the markup in Zotero RDF of course.

nickbart

I for one specifically proposed using "<space>:<space>".

":<space>" simply will not do since it’s ambiguous, as noted before.

"<space>:<space>" is entirely unambiguous, relatively unobtrusive, and though I agree users would have to be made aware of this markup convention I don't feel this is a major problem.

My impression is that "<space>:<space>" is very widely adopted in library catalogues (for examples see https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/35190/beta-capitalization-after-colons/#Item_50) which of course makes import easy.

As to export/import to other formats, at least biblatex does have separate title and subtitle fields (incl. booktitle/booksubtitle, maintitle/mainsubtitle, issuetitle/issuesubtitle, and journaltitle/journalsubtitle).