Upgrade StorageIncorrect APA style film citing?
I tried the search function but couldn't come up with a similar topic, so I started a new one.I'm a film and television student using the APA citation style. I've noticed that when I try to cite a film with Zotero the format used is:
Director. (Date). Title. Recording Type: Distributor.
I've searched the net up and down and in every case I've found film citations to be like so:
Producer, P. P. (Producer), & Director, D.D. (Director). (Date of publication). Title of motion picture [Motion picture]. Country of origin: Studio or distributor.
An example being:
Smith, J.D. (Producer), & Smithee, A.F. (Director). (2001). Really big disaster movie [ Motion picture]. United States: Paramount Pictures.
Is there something I've missed here, or is the APA style film citation wrong? I noticed there is no country of origin box in the info section of an item.
Here's a reference I've been using before using Zotero:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/11/
Director. (Date). Title. Recording Type: Distributor.
I've searched the net up and down and in every case I've found film citations to be like so:
Producer, P. P. (Producer), & Director, D.D. (Director). (Date of publication). Title of motion picture [Motion picture]. Country of origin: Studio or distributor.
An example being:
Smith, J.D. (Producer), & Smithee, A.F. (Director). (2001). Really big disaster movie [ Motion picture]. United States: Paramount Pictures.
Is there something I've missed here, or is the APA style film citation wrong? I noticed there is no country of origin box in the info section of an item.
Here's a reference I've been using before using Zotero:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/11/
I do have APA cite both director and producer, though, so maybe you're doing something wrong there (after you have put in director, press the plus next to it. You'll get a second line that says director, press the little arrow next to it and select producer).
But all of the other things you say are true & I'm also surprised there is no location.
It's possible to adjust APA to that, but that would be quite a bit of work
Since Zotero doesn't work with IMDB I've been using Amazon.co.uk as a quick source for film info, but that does seem to do some things poorly. First of all, it takes the title of the film without removing the bracketed stuff stating format and release date; so I get "Chinatown [DVD] [1974]" as the title. Also, Zotero doesn't have a release date box, so in the bibliography it sticks the publishing date in the field there release date is supposed to be. Release date is put in the "Extra" box.
I suppose this stuff is going to be ironed out eventually. At least I know I'm not doing anything wrong. Thanks for the quick reply.
Edit: Also, there is no "Studio" box into the info window for Film items.
This issue hasn't been resolved yet, right?
I have "American Psychological Association 6th Edition" installed from Zotero repository updated 10/10/2011 and films are still showing like this:
Becker, W. (2004). Good Bye Lenin! Comedia/Drama/Romance, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
So, I think it's currently showing: Director. (Date). Title. Genre, Distributor.
Fortunately, I have seen the very much well documented request for a "country of origin" field in this thread and my guess is that will be implemented in the near future without much trouble.
Nevertheless, I thought the suggestion made from fbennett in the "Changes to fields and item types for Zotero 3.1+" could be used to map the Extra field in Film item types (or is it Motion Picture? I'm not sure because I'm using Zotero in Spanish) to draw the Country of origin data.
Before, I've fought my deal of fights with code to replace some mistakes in APA style in Spanish Locale (as noted here) but I'm still far from taking the lead in that quest.
Finally, this other comment from adamsmith in the same thread got me completely hopeless that the very director-producer issue could have been resolved (Aren't they treated as Name Variables in Author? Again, I don't understand Zotero-CSL workflow entirely). I just hope I won't have to manually copy-paste fix all the films in my very film oriented one year long thesis :)
Thanks in advance for any kind of help.
"This issue hasn't been resolved yet, right?"
you're right, it hasn't been resolved.
I'm copying the suggestion for a "country of origin" workaround to its thread, with some other suggestion at how could be implemented.
But if I have to make a question it would be: How are the director, producer and script writer (guionista) fields mapped to CSL? That, I suppose it's the basic information I would have to manage to go through coding my custom APA film bibliography. What else?
As for solutions - I don't think anyone is very interested in implementing workarounds (like the extra field) at this point, much better to actually get this fixed.
1. adding '[DVD]' after the title in the title field.
2. List all producers and directors in author fields.
3. Put author last name comma and first initial in last name field.
4. Use first name field to type (Producer)and (Director) for last listed director and producer only. List producer first and then director.
This makes it show up almost formatted correctly in the reference list. Just need to un-italicize 'DVD' and remove extra commas after author first initial manually. Better than entering the whole citation manually. Hope this helps someone.
Either way, this is unrelated to the discussion above. Please start a new thread with any further questions.
I would like to be able to cite movies in (or near) to APA style, without having to input all the data myself by hand, in any way possible.
And if you do insist on continuing discussion in this thread, you could at least provide the information I requested above.
I would like to cite movies. IMDB is not important. E.g. Amazon.co.uk as mentioned above would also be fine. Anywhere would be fine. But I know of nowhere that allows use to cite movies.
Is it useful for me to list some of the sites that do *not* allow me to cite movies? There are surely many places that do not allow me to cite movies.
As mentioned above amazon.co.uk gives the DVD information which may include the word [DVD] as mentioned above, and it also gives the DVD release date rather than the movie original release data.
I was attempting to cite "2001: A Space Odyssey." There are many urls on for instance amazon (as referenced above) that do not import the information as described earlier in this thread.
E.g. any of the hits here
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=2001+a+space+odyssey+1968&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3A2001+a+space+odyssey
Such as
http://www.amazon.com/2001-Space-Odyssey-Keir-Dullea/dp/B00005ASUM/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1369730893&sr=8-4&keywords=2001+a+space+odyssey+1968
Gives
Kubrick, S. (2001). 2001 - A Space Odyssey. Warner Home Video.
(Which is not too bad
And *for instance* IMBD
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/
Gives
Kubrick, S. (1968). 2001: A Space Odyssey. Adventure, Mystery, Sci-Fi.
Rather than the APA citation format(assuming correct, copying from above)
Producer, P. P. (Producer), & Director, D.D. (Director). (Date of publication). Title of motion picture [Motion picture]. Country of origin: Studio or distributor.
The above amazon citation
Kubrick, S. (2001). 2001 - A Space Odyssey. Warner Home Video.
Is not bad at all but it would be nice to have at least the original date and distributor, which would probably be difficult to obtain from amazon. I'd be delighted with (apologies to producers)
Kubrick, S. (1968). 2001 - A Space Odyssey. MGM.
Or better
Kubrick, S. (1968). 2001 - A Space Odyssey. US/UK: MGM.
But specifically for the producer field: As you can see above, the APA style needs a producer for citing films.
I guess we _could_ map it to editor, but it would be awkward. I generally agree, but the reasons that's not the case are historical. Zotero fields and item types were generated back in 2006 as a combination of what people felt they needed and what was used in some existing cataloging standards - I know they looked at pubmed, I imagine they looked at library catalogs/MARC. Those don't necessarily overlap perfectly with the requirements of citation styles and so some awkward item types were added (in retrospect I don't think there should be a "podcast" item type) and some fields that are of more interest for cataloging than for citing: E.g. I don't think we'll ever map "cast member".
The proposal: The entirely uncontroversial mapping of "Director" to the CSL variable "director" should be implemented as soon as possible. The mapping "Director" -> "author" should be dropped altogether.
In a different thread, the suggestion was made, "I think we should map both base fields [author] and the actual item-specific fields [director] to CSL, so that both are available." (https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/27878/chicago-styles-director/), but I strongly disagree, feeling this will only create massive, unnecessary complications for writing style files.
Existing styles will have to be updated, of course, but this will usually not involve more than adding a line for "director" along the existing ones for "editor" and "translator" inside <substitute> elements, substituting an empty "author" by "director" if the latter exists - something that is not possible if "Director" is also mapped to "author".
The first question is simply: Is the output from "Export to CSL JSON" identical with what is forwarded by Zotero to citeproc-js, or are there any differences?
The second question: Do we have any forum, or thread, where a systematic review of the missing variables required by style guides and disciplinal traditions for proper citation of audiovisual material takes place?
more generally where things that we believe should happen wrt Zotero and CSL field updates are listed. The idea is that most of the discussion should take place here, though.
I think that's going to be as systematic as it gets.
I'm a bit divided. We actually do use the same function to export to CSL-JSON and this sort of duplication does not make sense in the exported data (we could filter that out, but I'd rather not if it's unnecessary). OTOH, this would break existing CSL styles, since I don't think many (any?) of them anticipate "director". I suppose that, additionally, every single item type currently exports an 'author' and this would deviate from this behavior.
(maybe it's ok to duplicate this in the export as well?? I'm not sure what software currently relies on CSL-JSON export translator output)
Also, @Dan, I assume Zotero server-side API uses this function to serve CSL-JSON output as well, right?
More importantly, yes, this would break existing CSL styles, but, as adamsmith said earlier in this thread, rather than "implementing workarounds [...] much better to actually get this fixed".
And the fix seems relatively easy: For chicago-author-date.csl, it was only necessary to replace, twice
<substitute>by<names variable="editor"/>
<names variable="translator"/>
<text macro="title"/>
</substitute>
<substitute><names variable="editor"/>
<names variable="translator"/>
<names variable="director"/>
<text macro="title"/>
</substitute>
Maybe this could even be automated to a large extent ...
a) we'll likely be able to do this automatically for a lot of styles and
b) even where not, the style is likely incorrect for films anyway, so we're not losing much.
So I'd be happy with just switching the mapping. Will do it when I have some time or someone else can - it's a quick patch.
As far as I can tell, the Director box is already mapped to CSL director, so the only change needed would be to remove its mapping to CSL author.
Unfortunately, although this is a very small change that makes a lot of sense, it is a little awkward to do on Zotero-side. (The next two paragraphs basically say what @aurimas says above, but in excruciating detail.)
Each Zotero item type, including those for the authorless types mentioned by @nickbart, has a "primary" author field—for Zotero Book Section and for Newspaper Article, the primary field is Author—the field is there, but items become authorless when it has no value.
So the consistent way to make Director/director a non-author variable would be to follow Zotero Book Section and Newspaper Article, and map Zotero Author to CSL author on the Film/motion_picture type, bumping Zotero Director out of its "primary" slot—but this would touch the database schema shared between clients and the Zotero sync service, and sync would break. If I understand the roadmap correctly, the change won't be possible until Zotero 4.2.
As far as I can tell, though, Film/motion_picture is a weird creature anyway, in that for production films, it doesn't make sense to speak of single, unambiguous "author" in a generic sense. It seems to be a general problem that runs beyond citation conventions: the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals very recently tied itself in knots over a takedown notice that turned on the same issue:
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I do think we could say that author is never a sensible field on the CSL motion_picture type, and do filtering. If that idea were to be adopted in CSL (via discussion on the xbiblio-devel list), then input could be filtered in one of two ways: either on the input (which would require action by every CSL-consuming project out there); or in the citation processors, through an amendment to the CSL specification (there are several processors, but fewer than there are projects).
If that all makes sense (not a foregone conclusion, that), shall we start a discussion on xbiblio-devel?
What I'm less sure about is why this would need discussion on xbiblio (although I'm happy to do that if you think there's really a need). The fact that Zotero is mapping director to author as a fallback category is based nowhere in the CSL specifications. Those have, as far as I can tell, no concept of such a fallback author.
I have no idea what other implementations do about this, it's possible that they already treat directors differently from authors.
The BibTeX record exports like this:
@misc{Smith2000,author = {Smith, John},
keywords = {Jake Makdoodle},
publisher = {Sandwich Films},
title = {{From Here to There}},
year = {2000}
}
The RIS export looks like this:
TY - MPCT
T1 - From Here to There
A1 - Smith, John
Y1 - 2000///
KW - Jake Makdoodle
PB - Sandwich Films
ER -
The CSL JSON sent to the word processor plugins looks like this:
{
"author": [
{
"dropping-particle": "",
"family": "Smith",
"given": "John",
"non-dropping-particle": "",
"parse-names": false,
"suffix": ""
}
],
"id": "ITEM-1",
"issued": {
"date-parts": [["2000"]]
},
"publisher": "Sandwich Films",
"title": "From Here to There",
"type": "motion_picture"
}
So it does look like this is a CSL-wide issue.
If styles are modified to make use of the director variable, the impact on existing projects could be reduced by implicitly remapping any author variable to director if the latter is empty, and by always removing the author variable, on this type. That would fix things, but as it would tamper with input data, putting it through a round of discussion on the CSL specification list would give consuming projects a say in the change, and a heads-up before users begin commenting on a change in behaviour.
Even if the possibly-not-good idea of adjusting the input data inside the processors is dropped for being too much of a hack, discussion on the list would give consuming projects notice of the issue, before users begin commenting on discrepancies in CSL output between different projects.
I see that director should be mapped in Zotero, but can't actually make that happen (if that did work, we could already use workarounds, e.g. testing for director in an author/contributor macro).
If I call
<names variable="director"><name/></names>for a film (with director) in Zotero I don't get anything rendered.
Any idea why? Or am I doing something dumb in my test?