remove Transform Text -> Title Case option?

dstillman
Continuing from aurimas's comment in another thread:
I would argue that Zotero should not offer the Transform to title case option.
That's not a bad idea—I myself have had a hard time remembering which format titles are supposed to be in for citing, and this would be one way to convey that. The concern, of course, would be people just using Zotero itself or using Zotero data in ways other than via the CSL processor (or maybe the subset of those people who are 1) in the humanities and 2) in the US).

Regardless, it'd be nice if we had a better way of explaining to people why the capitalization of their bib output is wrong.
  • epescador
    But if you remove the "Transform to Title Case" option, then those of us who use it--and I use it a lot--will have to make changes by hand, or use some workaround like copying an all-caps or all-lower title from a pdf or html doc into Word, then using the toggle case function to edit the title--but that doesn't follow title case rules, so most titles will still need tweaking. Then I have to copy the corrected title into the Title field in the Info tab. This is what I did before I discovered the "Transform" feature, and it is a pain.
  • FHeimburger
    To add to the complexity - in France I was taught several times (and am currently looking for a viable reference online) to quote titles "as-is" printed on book cover, article first page etc. - usually title case for publications in English, but there is the odd example in my database where that is not the case.
    I have therefore been entering titles into my database as-is (and essentially hoping I will never have to publish anything using a style that requests sentence case no matter what).
  • adamsmith
    @espescador - this is not about abolishing the Transform option entirely: there will still be the "sentence case" option and styles that require title case can automatically transform sentence case --> title case.

    @clio - but that can't possibly be right? At least in the US, a large share of book titles are in all caps on the cover and then usually in sentence case on the inside (bc that's what the LoC stores).
  • aurimas
    But if you remove the "Transform to Title Case" option, then those of us who use it--and I use it a lot--will have to make changes by hand[...]
    The argument is that you should not do this. If the citation style requires title case, it can do the conversion automatically from sentence case. However, if the style requires sentence case, the conversion from a manually entered title case is impossible. So by fixing the title to title case in zotero you are making it "look nice" in zotero, but are making it impossible for the citation style to do automatic formatting.
    To add to the complexity - in France I was taught several times (and am currently looking for a viable reference online) to quote titles "as-is" printed on book cover, article first page etc.
    Citation styles for non-English locales should not perform title case conversions. Either way, removal of this "feature" should not impact this issue.
  • aurimas
    Dan wrote:
    The concern, of course, would be people just using Zotero itself or using Zotero data in ways other than via the CSL processor (or maybe the subset of those people who are 1) in the humanities and 2) in the US).
    Maybe if we considered specific examples of this, we could determine if this feature is necessary.

    For people using zotero itself, title casing is just an aesthetic issue. If anything we could add a flag to about:config to display the title field in title case, but not actually change the data.

    For the latter case, I can only think of one example (though I'm sure more exist), which is BibTeX export for use in other applications. This of course depends on how good the other application is at styling titles. If it it's not able to convert cases, then this possibly warrants for a flag during export that will perform the conversion.
  • adamsmith
    Yes - my main concern would also be people who use Zotero as only one step in a workflow and don't use CSL as a citation engine.

    I'm also not sure if removing the title casing option will "nudge" people to do the right thing and store their titles in sentence case.
  • FHeimburger
    adamsmith wrote:

    but that can't possibly be right? At least in the US, a large share of book titles are in all caps on the cover and then usually in sentence case on the inside (bc that's what the LoC stores).
    I have raised that point with an editor, and been told to use whatever is on the inside on occasion - in the first five random cases on my bookshelf in English that is actually title case.

    aurimas wrote:

    Citation styles for non-English locales should not perform title case conversions. Either way, removal of this "feature" should not impact this issue.
    But if at least one French publishing house has required me to use "original format" - mostly title case - for English titles, surely this is a problem. I suppose I could store everything in sentence case, have a style with a French locale which title-cases English titles (is that possible ? not sure) and hope there aren't too many books out there which actually have titles in sentence case?

    Either way, you're both right that this is not directly linked to the right-click options - but it does make me wonder how best to go forward from here, knowing I am likely to need to quote these English references using both French and English styles.
  • aurimas
    edited June 6, 2012
    IMO, the right-click option exists because of items that are imported by translators. Quite frequently the metadata (including titles and author names) is presented online in all upper case. Many translators check for this and transform titles into title case, but, naturally, there are cases where all upper case titles slip by. That's where the right-click solution is useful. But if one has to figure out if the original title is title-cased or sentence-cased, this little shortcut doesn't save you that much time overall.

    From Dan's original post:
    Regardless, it'd be nice if we had a better way of explaining to people why the capitalization of their bib output is wrong.
    EDIT: sorry, I misread that a little and answered a different question. Nevertheless, I think this may be a good idea.

    Considering clio_13's use case, the option would in some rather rare cases offer a convenient shortcut. However, to inform the users of the pitfalls discussed above, we could add a pop-up dialog that appears when the right-click "Transform to Title Case" option is used. It would briefly point out that automatic conversion back to sentence case, which is requested by some journals, is not reliable and titles should, in most cases, be left in their original case for best performance. There would also be a check-box that one could mark to not warn about this again.

    clio_13 wrote:
    it does make me wonder how best to go forward from here, knowing I am likely to need to quote these English references using both French and English styles.
    I think you should enter these in the "original format" Adamsmith can probably make a better claim about this, but I would imagine that most journals want either original case or title case (both of which would work for you). And if the journal insists on sentence case, the CSL processor offers (at least in the specification) forced conversion to sentence case.
  • adamsmith
    (I can't speak for French journals and I'm sure Clio is correct for that and I vaguely remember something similar for German citations - but in the US - both in style manuals and in journals - the idea of an "original format" does not exist. They want either title case of sentence case, applied consistently. That's why I think the "original format" practice makes no sense when applied to US titles, but clearly Clio's publisher(s) don't agree)

    I think Aurima's pop-up idea is good - it will probably server better to inform users than taking out the option, you can disable it, and we keep the title case option for odd cases like Clio's scenario above.
  • RintzeRintze
    edited June 7, 2012
    It might be worth considering this in a somewhat broader scope. There are several other "recommended practices" when it comes to storing metadata in Zotero for use with CSL styles, such as storing journal abbreviations with periods instead of without, and standardizing author names to avoid too much disambiguation. It would be nice if we could communicate these tips to the user somehow.
  • Geoffrey Kantaris
    Please don't get rid of the right-click transform case option. I use it all the time because the sources I download titles from are a complete mishmash, and it's the only way of getting some uniformity. I think the idea that a CLS processor could be intelligent enough to know that a word in a title is a proper noun, and therefore should be exempt from conversion to sentence case, is extremely problematic. There is surely no way of blanket-imposing a particular case on a particular title and get it right in all cases.

    Then there is the question of the rules to be used when citing sources from different foreign languages in an English-language bibliography (something that, as a Modern Linguist, I do all the time). Good academic conventions are, for example, to use title case for English, except for non-significant words, but to use DIFFERENT rules for French, Spanish, etc. Citation in French, even in an English bibliography, should use French academic rules. So, Proust, M., À la recherche du temps perdu is sentence case because the first word is not a definite article. But Derrida, J., La Disséminations must have the first noun capitalzed, likewise Badiou, A., L'Être et l'événement (note only the first noun is capitalized). It gets more complicated when a title starts with an indefinite article or a particle, etc.

    Some publishers follow such academic conventions and others are laissez-faire. So as far as I can see it, by far the best solution is to let the users of Zotero decide how they would like each title according to their most common usage scenarios, and let them enter that as a baseline.
  • fbennett
    edited September 3, 2012
    Please don't get rid of the right-click transform case option.
    The thought with which this thread began was to (possibly) eliminate the Title Case transform, but keep the Sentence Case option. The reasoning behind the suggestion was that, as you say, reliable conversion from Title Case to Sentence Case would require a magical way of identifying which words are proper nouns and which are not. That is not a problem for conversions in the other direction, so Sentence Case is the recommended storage form in the database.
    Good academic conventions are, for example, to use title case for English, except for non-significant words, but to use DIFFERENT rules for French, Spanish, etc. Citation in French, even in an English bibliography, should use French academic rules.
    Zotero does this now. The behaviour depends on the content of the Language field. The examples you give will come out correctly if the title is entered in (French-style) sentence case, with "fr" in the Language field: in that case, the CSL processor will not touch the content, even in a style that sets titles with text-case="title".

    (Returning to your main point, though, from the discussion it looks like the consensus is to keep the transform menu in more or less its current form.)
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