Upgrade StorageDistinction between ancient and contemporary authors
Dear all,
Working on a bibliographic style citing books written by ancient authors (as Herodote) differently than books written by contemporary authors, I would like to know if there’s a way to create a distinction between these two kinds of authors?
Is the variable Original Author suitable in this case? If so, will it not implied to repeat the name of the author in the Author field but also in the Extra with Original Author?
Thank you for your help.
Working on a bibliographic style citing books written by ancient authors (as Herodote) differently than books written by contemporary authors, I would like to know if there’s a way to create a distinction between these two kinds of authors?
Is the variable Original Author suitable in this case? If so, will it not implied to repeat the name of the author in the Author field but also in the Extra with Original Author?
Thank you for your help.
Ancient author:
Hérodote, Histoires II
Hérodote, Histoires II, P.-E. Legrand (éd.), Paris, 1936.
Contemporary author:
Assmann 2001
J. Assmann, The search for God in Ancient Egypt, Ithaca, 2001.
The only differences between those two references in the bibliography is the way the entry is registered and the presence of the editor/translator's name for the one written by an ancient author. However, both have an editor/translator in the data (the second one is a translation from German).
But, yes, CSL doesn’t currently have a ‘classic’ type for this type of item. The extension to CSL used by Jurism, does however, but not sure if that is overkill for your purposes. https://juris-m.github.io
Either:
- cite ancient authors manually in the notes
- add the editions you've consulted as normal books to the bibliography. (Possibly, you will want to have a separate bibliography for ancient works, anyway.)
Or:
- cite everything in the same style. That will give you Hérodote 1936.
- Search/Replace when everything is done.
Yes, we should add the translator's name.
I wonder if we can use original-author in the extra field to create a distinction between ancient and contemporary author ?
That implies to repeat the information about the author, but it gives us a way to create the distinction in CSL without being completely wrong.
A possible solution (at least in bibliography):
It is needed to consider that ancient sources are books that have an author and an editor or a translator.
Then two true/false tests:
<else-if type="book">
<choose>
<if variable="author">
<choose>
<if variable="editor translator" match="none">
<text macro="normal-book"/>
</if>
<else>
<text macro="edited-ancient-sources"/>
</else>
</choose>
</if>
<else>
<text macro="normal-book"/>
</else>
</choose>
</else-if>
The same tests might be used on the way the publication year is rendered, using, for ancient sources, the short title of the book instead of the year.
But this solution is problematic with e.g. posthumously edited books.
All of this would be @maier.de 's first solution
<choose>
<if variable="original-author">
<text variable ="title">
</if>
<else>
<date variable="issued">
<date-part name="year"/>
</date>
</else>
</choose>
@maier.de Two uses I’ve thought of for original-author are here https://github.com/citation-style-language/documentation/issues/55
Some discussion related to it being used as a classical author is here https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/82698/old-zotero-interface-in-current-word#latest
You can, however, use that in Zotero as well. If the style is for your personal use only (i.e., you don't intend to upload the style to the styles repository), you can just add `type: classic` to the extra field. Zotero will give you a warning when you install a style that uses such non-standard fields or item types, but it will work nevertheless. The citation processor will pick it up, and process citations accordingly. (You could even invent new item types.)
I am also working on the IFAO style, so I cannot use a solution only available for me.
We cannot use the presence of a translator to distinguish ancient sources because as I previously said, there's also contemporary books with translator and this information should be given in the bibliography. There's also ancient sources in our languages (as the category "Relation de voyage" of the IFAO style).
My idea was to create "hybrid" reference mixing contemporary and ancient books. The standard Zotero fields will be used to add the information on the book and the extra field to add information on the ancient source (original-title and original-author). It will give something like this:
[
{
"id": "http://zotero.org/users/4597224/items/6SGFQVQZ",
"type": "book",
"event-place": "Paris",
"note": "original-author: Hérodote\noriginal-title: Ἱστορίαι",
"publisher-place": "Paris",
"title": "Hérodote. Histoires. Livre I. Clio",
"editor": [
{
"family": "Legrand",
"given": "Philippe-Ernest"
}
],
"issued": {
"date-parts": [
[
"1942"
]
]
}
}
]
But I am not sure if it is correct.
original-authorandoriginal-titlewould not fit as they are not used for such purpose elsewhere.In IFAO style (see also there for a forthcoming version), the translator is never called except for such cases so it should not create problems.
If and when a Classic item will be created, then the style will be adapted.
As for the category carnet de voyage, there are discrepancies in the style as it is presented now (but we can discuss that elsewhere).