Citation Style help needed - Anthropology (AAA)

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  • The only difference between this and the AAA style that I can identify is that citations that go on for multiple lines after the Author's name should be indented for each of those additional lines.
    Just to be clear, you mean they should be a left-aligned and indented block, while now you have only the first line indented?
  • That's correct. Thanks.
  • I was struggling to get this right - anyone has a good idea? Part of the problem is that various ways to generate the citation lead to different outcomes - html, rtf, clipboard and word processor plugin seem to interpret these things slightly differenlty.
  • I have a feeling you're going to need to hear from Simon on this one.
  • edited April 19, 2011
    The style guide (http://www.aaanet.org/publications/style_guide.pdf, e.g. page 7) shows two levels of indentation. Furthermore, a field beginning on the first indentation level can continue on a new line with the second indentation level. I don't see a way to code this with CSL 1.0.
  • So isn't it straightforward enough to simply say the within-author-group item block is actually a hanging-indent? We might need to revisit the display values, perhaps adding one for "hanging"? Something vaguely like ...

    <layout>
    <group display="block">
    <names variable="author"/>
    </group>
    <group display="block indent hanging">
    ...
    </group>
    </layout>
  • That looks like the logic that's needed. Had a fiddle myself, and there doesn't seem to be a way to get the exact effect. The processor doesn't really do much for these, it just passes a markup wrapper through to the calling application. The options need to be amenable to expression at least in RTF and HTML, and as you say, it's Simon's convenience on the line. I'll wait for guidance from CSL and Zotero; whatever is needed in the markup, I can pass through from the processor;
  • An AAA style that covers (hopefully) all item type listed in the AAA styleguide is now up at
    https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/raw/master/aaa.csl

    Below is a compatibility list to the AAA citation style ( http://www.aaanet.org/publications/style_guide.pdf ).
    Please report any issues here. The development of this style has been supported by the Society for Cultural Anthropology (thanks!). As part of my agreement with the SCA I agreed to promptly fix any issues in the style as far as possible within Zotero/CSL.


    Compliance of aaa.csl (and its implementation in Zotero 2.1.7) with the AAA style guide
    Numbers refer to the examples given in AAA (2009:7-9)

    1.Corrrect. Note that for this and all others CSL will automatically title case titles. It is recommended to store titles in Zotero in sentence case
    2.Correct
    3.Currently not supported in Zotero/CSL (suggested to add “with” authors manually to the bib at the end of editing)
    4.Correct
    5.Mostly correct – write “In press” in the date field – will incorrectly use “In press” instead of “in press” for in-text citations. Fully supported in CSL but not yet in Zotero
    6.Correct – it's important to leave the date field blank, do not write n.d. or so in the date field.
    7.Correct – due to the diversity of archives, some experimenting might be needed on how to best input data.
    8.Correct
    9.Correct
    10.Correct
    11.Correct – special issue titles are not fully supported in Zotero, but will display correctly if full title of the special issue (e.g. 'Theme issue, “The Social Production of Authoritative Knowledge in Pregnancy and Childbirth,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly') is input in publication field
    12.Correct
    13.Volume titles are currently not supported in Zotero/CSL. Recommended to insert full title into the title field, e.g.: Animals and Archaeology, vol. 1: Hunters and Their Prey, leaving volume field blank. Individual volumes w/o volume title are displayed correctly when volume number is in Zotero
    14.Review Item types are currently not supported in Zotero. First example will display correctly by including full title with mark-up in the title field, e.g.: <i>Review of </i> Beyond Language: Social and Cultural Factors in Schooling Language Minority Students
    The second example given is inconsistent with the rest of AAA style
    15.Correct
    16.Correct
    17.Correct – note that unpublished conference papers should be assigned the “Presentation” item type. Defaults to “Paper presented at the...” when field “Type” is empty. Otherwise content of “Type” field replaces, as in “Keynote Lecture presented at the...”
    18.Mostly correct – original dates of publication aren't supported in Zotero, but are formated correctly in the CSL, when variable is given
    19.Correct (same caveat as 18)
    20.Correct – the first three examples are displayed correctly. The forth one is inconsistent with the second and third.
    21.Not included – item types not required in the reference list are not included
    22.Not included – see 21
    23.Correct
    24.Not fully supported: Inserting the title with translation in brackets will work. Users with many non-English sources should consider the “Multilingual Zotero,” currently still experimental, but quite stable
    25.Limited: Runtime not currently possible in Zotero/CSL. “dir” suffix not supported, work-around does not pluralize (I.e. single and multiple directors are “dir.” not “dirs.”) . Second style example inconsistent with first one. Interview can be done either using “Interview” or “TV-Broadcast” item type, though both awkwardly. For Interview item type put: “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. PBS” in the field “Medium”. For TV-Broadcast put “Bush, George” as director.
  • adamsmith - you are my hero. What wonderful news to receive during a break from dissertation writing! Thank you! Jennifer
  • This is great news. Thanks a lot, adamsmith and everyone else who has participated in putting this together!
  • This is great. I was hoping an anthro organization would come forward. This is the way it should be done.
  • As far as I can tell, the indentation problem that we discussed above still exists with the new style. Bibliographies (generated using Zotero 2.1.6, the latest stable version, and the Word 2010 plugin) resolve text to the left after the first indented line, rather than farther to the right, as in the AAA style.

    The style ought to be good enough for submitting to AAA journals but not (without a lot of manual indenting) formatting those journals, dissertations, etc. Does this seem fixable?
  • No, not currently unfortunately, that's why it's not working. I will, at some point, try to play with the formatting settings to see if there is a setting that would make it easier to get the formatting right in the bibliography just by adjusting the margins for the bibliography in Word/Ooo - i.e. without touching individual items - but a) I'm not very optimistic and b) that would still require post-Zotero editing - it might just be faster.
  • Too bad. Thanks, though.
  • @adamsmith - it seems to me the preferable solution to the indenting issue is to do it with paragraph styles. So the author heading, for example, would have one paragraph style (say, simply, "bibliography"), and the other blocks another (maybe "bibliography-indent"?). Not sure whether citeproc-js can pass that information on or not.
  • Yeah, that might work - I'll have to see if/how I can implement that, but I guess at least for the time being that seems like the most likely possible solution. Just as a reminder, this is how things should look:

    Bakhtin, Mikhail
    1981 The Dialogic Imagination. Caryl Emerson
    and Michael Holquist, trans. Austin: University
    of Texas Press.


    In the current style we have:
    Bakhtin, Mikhail
    1981 The Dialogic Imagination. Caryl Emerson
    and Michael Holquist, trans. Austin: University
    of Texas Press.


    i.e. the problem as of now is the alignment of the 3rd and subsequent lines.
  • Right. So the second line should be indented w/hanging indent.
  • edited May 23, 2011
    Just hanging indent is not enough, technically; the titles should also be left-aligned with each other. I.e. the title of Bakhtin (1111) below should be left aligned with the title of Bakhtin 1981. This works in the example below only because it uses a monospaced font. Most documents won't use that and so it wouldn't be aligned.


    Bakhtin, Mikhail
    1111 Imaginary title. Bla.
    1981 The Dialogic Imagination. Caryl Emerson
    and Michael Holquist, trans. Austin: University
    of Texas Press.


    If the other block ("bibliography-indent" in Bruce's example) can be given a different style in the word processor, the solution might be to use Tabs (i.e. [tab]year[tab]title) and to specify the tab distance in the style. This is supported across Word and Open/Neo Office as far as I know.

    The lazy solution is to trust that most years have the same width typographically anyway and to just do the work with hardcoded spaces. Less elegant but it might sort of work for most people. I don't particularly like hardcoded spaces though because you can't style them.
  • Note that the current layout already has a space between year and title (I think it's actually a tab?) and aligns the titles - so that works fine as is. I agree that we should try to be able to solve this without hard-coded spaces, though, yes.
  • Thank you very much guys
  • I've found another issue with the style. In bibliographies, it capitalizes the first letter of words that aren't capitalized in the Zotero Library. It does seem to get English right: not capitalizing articles, etc. But for those of us working in other languages this is a problem. Some other Zotero styles do seem to get this right. I'm currently using the AAA style with titles in Portuguese and the capitalization problem emerges with the AAA style, but not with Chicago. For example, Here's AAA, which needlessly capitalizes words that shouldn't be capitalized:

    Freyre, Gilberto
    1933 Casa Grande E Senzala: Formação Da Família Brasileira Sob O Regime Da Economia Patriarcal. Rio de Janeiro: Maia & Schmidt.

    And here's Chicago, which defers to the capitalization as I have it in my Zotero library:

    Freyre, Gilberto. 1933. Casa Grande e Senzala: Formação da Família Brasileira Sob o Regime da Economia Patriarcal. Rio de Janeiro: Maia & Schmidt.

    Can you fix this in future versions of the style? Thanks!
  • that's actually not trivial. Sure, we could take title casing out and always defer to the case saved in Zotero, but there's a downside: A lot of - and by most accounts an increasing number of - styles require sentence case instead of title case. (APA is the most prominent, but by far not the only example). It's impossible to force sentence case in a reasonable way, so we suggest people store items in sentence case and we force title case where required so that they will be correct in both sentence and title case.

    Obviously that does create problems for foreign language titles. In the next version, Zotero will be able to read a two letter code from the language fields. (e.g. "pt" in your case) and won't title case anything that's not English.

    For what it's worth, your Freyre is not correct Chicago style:

    "14.107 Non-English titles
    Sentence-style capitalization is strongly recommended for non-English titles (see 11.3)."

    Just do underline the problems.
  • Makes sense. The language-coding will solve this.

    And the Freyre is correct. It's just that Zotero messes up sentence-style capitalization for languages other than English. The "o" and "da" in the title are articles/prepositions ("the" and "of the") that Zotero wouldn't capitalize in English. So, yeah, either deferring to the library capitalization for non-English entries or (better, but lots more work, of course) creating sentence-style databases for multiple languages would be good.

    Thanks again.
  • glad that works for you. Just FYI - you're confusing title and sentence case.
    Title case is
    An Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations
    Sentence case is
    An inquiry into the wealth of nations

    We researched this and title case is not used in any language other than English. I actually specifically looked up title case for Portuguese, where title case at least exists in theory, but isn't used in academic publications and discouraged by the standardization agencies of both Portugal and Brazil:
    http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caixa_alta#Norma_latina_vs_norma_germ.C3.A2nica

    Following CMoS, the Freyre citation should be:

    Freyre, Gilberto. 1933. Casa grande e senzala: Formação da família Brasileira sob o regime da economia patriarcal. Rio de Janeiro: Maia & Schmidt.

    I can't guarantee that AAA would require the same, but it certainly looks that way.
    For that reason we would always want to go with the title as entered for non-English citations and even if we had the resources coming up with title-casing rules would not be helpful: Because they don't exist.
  • Oh, you're right. Thanks for the heads up.
  • Thanks to everyone who has been working on this CSL, adamsmith especially.

    Have there been any updates to the indentation problems discussed above? I'd love to help out in any way I can.
  • no updates - you can get pretty close by playing with the Word/Ooo indentation, but that's the best we have. This might get fixed at some point, but the requirement is so odd that it's actually pretty hard - I'm not even sure if that can be reasonably done within a Word processor. How do people do this manually?
  • It's tricky. Actually, I just figured out how to play around with the indentation on the CSL/Zotero-created bibliography and make it look correct.

    Basically you have to set up a couple of custom tab stop positions, as well as pulling back the 'hanging indent' tool on the ruler (in Word). I created an example .docx from the first page of an old bibliography and tossed it in my dropbox, if you'd like to check it out. The indentations were a guess, based on the AAA style guide PDF linked above. They're notoriously vague about the actual spacing. If you can help make the CSL respond appropriately to the indentations, I can try contacting the editors of the AAA journals to ask how *they* format their bibliographies. Then we could update the location of the tab stops to be more accurate.
  • I hit enter too soon. The docx file is here: http://db.tt/VCtYNDc

    Note that this was one of my first bibliographies, and I just updated it for the tab/indentation requirements. It may not accurately reflect AAA style in other ways. In fact I'm certain it doesn't. I have always gotten by on a sort of hybrid reference style of my own; all the more reason to get Zotero/CSL working for me before I get into trouble :)
  • Thanks - no need for you to get in touch with the AAA people - when this becomes relevant I can do that, I've been in touch with them about the style anyway.
    I'm not sure what the CSL folks are going to do about this - a style that requires two separate tab stops (in addition to regular hanging indent formatting) is just such a ridiculous choice, I'd be curious why AAA things this is a good idea in the first place. And we don't need this for any other style.
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