Anthropologists/Archaeologists--styles please

2
  • edited February 4, 2009
    Thanks for that, however, I'm afraid there is a problem with this AAA style. You've put a number of spaces after the date in the date macro to give you the right formatting for the bibliography, but you are also using this macro for citations, which creates big gaps between the surname and the year.

    You could have two separate date macros, one for citations and one for the bibliography. Alternatively, you can use this line, which I used in my version of AAA which was posted in another discussion page.
    <option name="hanging-indent" value="true"/>
  • edited February 4, 2009
    This is a modified version with two date macros: date1 for citation and date2 for bibliography.

    http://www.box.net/shared/su13dldql7

    Everything else should be the same.

    Actually, there are a few small differences from my version of AAA, which I think follows the official AAA style on these specific points:

    1) I think that the AAA style doesn't actually use italics for the title in the bibliography.
    2) AAA uses italics for 'in' when followed by the name of a journal or edited volume.
    3) AAA uses the plural eds. when appropriate. It is not capitalised and it follows the editor's name or editors' names rather than preceding it.

    Obviously, these are not major problems as most of the time you don't need a perfect version of AAA, and certainly this file is much tidier than mine.
  • edited February 4, 2009
    Posting it to SVN to make it more widely available might be a good idea, but it's still quite an ugly workaround, so I think this should be noted in the title.

    I'm calling it ugly because the indentation is still no real indentation of course; and the omitted author is actually represented by a whitespace, which causes a white line to appear whenever more than one work by an author is included.

    I really hope the developers are willing to work on a more permanent solution for this style and its several derivates. EndNote has never handled the case very well (basically relying on a similar workaround for omitting authors) — it would be cool if CSL/Zotero could get this right!

    (See this thread for details on the problem and on the workarounds.)
  • edited February 4, 2009
    @mark: looking again at that other thread, I think your suggestion for adding an "inline-block" value makes a lot of sense. I'll propose that.

    The thing I've not yet to figured out is the padding around the date, and the indenting. If you can figure out a generic way to do this (no tabs, for example)—both in CSL and in XHTML/CSS—let me know.
  • Thank you all for collaborating on this. If James has the most correct version of the AAA style, I'd like to suggest that it get posted to the SVN. The more people that use it, the greater the chance to find someone else to help fix it.

    I am happy to merge James' 2 date version with my American Antiquity style (based on the AAA one) and get it posted too. I agree with Mark, but as James points out, having imperfect, but OK styles for anthropology/archaeology available is a LOT better than not having any at all.
  • Here are four possible ways of taking care of the padding and indentation in XHTML+CSS: AAA citation style test. The XHTML markup is only a quick mockup. The focus is on how to accomplish the right layout with the leanest code.
  • Great; thanks mark!

    Any thoughts on how to translate this (particularly the date padding) into more generic CSL (e.g. that can still be reasonably translated to other output formats; RTF, TeX, etc.)?
  • I'm kinda confused by this thread because AAA uses The Chicago Manual of Style and that comes with zotero
  • If I understand your comments in the AAA citation style test, I have a suggestion that might make this a little easier. Looking at the style guides for American Anthropologist and American Antiquity and their examples, it is not necessary for the citation text that immediately follows the date to be aligned with subsequent lines of citation text. It can just flow like a hanging indent.

    That is, some kind of double hanging indent (or equivalent) should be sufficient: the first hanging indent for any continuation of the author line beyond 1 and for the date, the second hanging indent for any citation text that continues on lines below the date.
  • bdarcus, if things like display:block do work (to give author it's own line) in the various export format, I would hope that display:inline-block also works. Especially if the text-flow isn't that important (as Michael says).

    In general, I think most would be very happy to get an output like the one below:

    Nettle, Daniel
    1999a Is the Rate of Linguistic Change Constant? Lingua: International Review of General Linguistics 108, no. 2: 119-36.
    1999b Is the Rate of Linguistic Change Constant? Lingua: International Review of General Linguistics 108, no. 2: 119-36.
    2000 Is the Rate of Linguistic Change Constant? Lingua: International Review of General Linguistics 108, no. 2: 119-36.

    That is, with the grouping or subsequent-author-omit issue fixed the right way (instead of author being an empty space taking up its own line).

    Going from that to the desired layout is just a matter of setting a hanging indentation and one tab in most Word processors.

    Question: couldn't one use the Unicode tab character? (\u0009 HTML entity , ampersand # 09 ; ) It doesn't seem to carry over into word processors though, judging from copy/pasting into MS Word 2003.
  • I've committed an American Antiquity style to the SVN. It is not perfect, but is quite usable and will hopefully encourage further work on this style. I played around with various ways of blocking the bibliography entries. Indeed, the new inline-block gave good results in some cases, but was garbled in others. So work on the Zotero parsers for this seems needed. As requested in the Style SVN guide, here is the information on the newly committed style.

    r4079

    American Antiquity style, based on preliminary American Anthropologist style by Mark Dingemanse. There are several workarounds to issues of CSL/Zotero integration that affect bibliographies of this somewhat complex style.

    The author is omitted after the first entry when there are multiple citations by the same author in a bibliography. This works OK, but generates an extra line feed because the omitted author name is replaced by a space. These extra lines need to be removed manually.

    The dates are indented beneath the author by using spaces rather than an embedded hanging indent.

    A hanging indent needs to be set manually in the wordprocessor used for the bibliography to indent the rest of the citation beneath the date. A hanging indent of about 1/2" looks pretty good for 12 point type. If this is done, the resulting bibliography looks pretty good and closely conforms to the American Antiquity standard.

    One other issue I noticed is that for works in press or otherwise unpublished, a notation of "nd" in the date field is parsed to 0000. A date of 0000 is ignored as are the prefix spaces. The result is that the "nd" notation does not print and the rest of the citation is pushed to the left margin.
  • Minor issue: I haven't seen the CSL file, but make sure you add yourself as an author. Styles can have multiple authors if I'm not mistaken (at least it would make sense if they could!).
  • I did this Mark, and said it was based on your American Anthropologist style.

    Could I convince you to go ahead and post that style, too, where it's at now. It should look at least as good as the American Antiquity style, although I think you said something about misplaced italics in some place.
  • Thanks to everyone who has been trying to deal with the problems associated with the American Anthropological Association (AAA) citation style. I have added all of the trial styles that you all have so graciously developed. Unfortunately, I still cannot use any of the styles to create a bibliography in my publications or other writings without significant tweaking. Does anybody know if there is any hope that the Zotero developers will be addressing this in the near future?

    I really want to get rid of EndNote for good and also to encourage anthropology students to adopt Zotero. However, I don't feel comfortable doing either as long as the process of creating a bibliography in AAA format (the current standard for most cultural anthropologists and anthropology students) is so complex.

    Please know that I do understand that this process is far from simple, as I tried in vain to create a CSL and discovered quickly that it is way beyond my capabilities. But, I thought I might just check in again to see if there is any new good news on this front?

    Thanks so much. I love Zotero!

    Best,
    Jennifer
  • I don’t know the history of the AAA style but it has always struck me as kind of odd. It just seems to me to complicate the Chicago style (which is the style used be Current Anthropology).
  • Odd or not, that's the one we need to use (and the related American Antiquity style). I used the draft American Antiquity style for an actual paper (instead of just some test references). Here are the issues.

    Every time you make a change, it reverts to double spaced. I can remove the extra line feeds, but it puts them back in if anything is changed. Same goes for the extra lines between multiple citations by the same author (not a big deal since there are few of them). It also resets my indents (needed to make it look right). With a hanging indent and single spacing, it looks quite good. I just wish it would not reformat the page when I redo the bib.
  • It should be possible to get rid of the extra spaces by the line spacing property (or some such thing). If you search for it, you'll find a few threads on how to solve this problem in CSL. The extra lines between multiple citations are the result of the CSL hack, as you know.

    As for indentation, I seem to remember that making a special Word formatting style and applying to the bibliography keeps certain things from going awry again.
  • For line-spacing and such, I think it's better to look into using your word-processor styles, than to modify a CSL style.
  • By the link given above, http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/28130/home/ForAuthors.html
    the American Journal of Physical Anthropology citation should be just a bit different than it is. Currently it is "(Hogue 2001a,b)" where it should be "(Hogue, 2001a,b)" with a comma after the author. If anyone could fix that, it'd be great. I don't have the time to try right now, though I would like to get into it after the semester is over.
  • edited April 24, 2009
    Matthew, I've just had a look and there are more problems with this style:

    1) Page numbers should be included in citations
    2) In the bibliography, references shouldn't be numbered but listed by author surname
    3) In the bibliography, page numbers should be in the "p 10" format
    4) In the bibliography short journal titles should be used
    5) Disambiguated citations should be like this "2000a,b" not "2000a, b" as now
  • edited April 24, 2009
    I have made changes to correct for 1, 2 and 3 above. I'm not sure how to deal with 4 as I've never dealt with short titles before. I don't think it's possible to do anything about 5 except edit it in the document itself.

    The new style can be downloaded here: http://www.box.net/shared/kpdor96hr5

    I'd appreciate it if someone could test it before it goes in the style repository.
  • edited April 24, 2009
    Thank you for your help in making these changes, especially so quickly.

    1 seems to be fine. For 2, the numbers in the bibliography have been removed but they are still arranged in the order in which they are cited. They should be alphabetical. I can't find where 3 is changed, but I don't think it needs to be (by my humble reading of the citation style).

    I'm not sure how to deal with 4 or 5 either. Again, thanks for your help!
  • edited April 24, 2009
    First, your style didn't validate (http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/creating_citation_styles#xml_validation). You shouldn't include multiple authors in a single author element.
    Incorrect:
    <author>
    <name>author 1</name>
    <name>author 2</name>
    </author>

    Correct:
    <author>
    <name>author 1</name>
    </author>
    <author>
    <name>author 2</name>
    </author>

    For 4), you can specify in the style to use the short form of the journal title, e.g.:
    <text variable="container-title" form="short"/>
    For 5) support is currently lacking. A solution (a new version of CSL and a new CSL processor) is in the works.
  • edited April 24, 2009
    I've corrected the way the bibliography sorts.

    Thanks to Rintze, the style should now verify and if there are abbreviated titles for journals they should display.

    The revised version can be downloaded from the same place:

    http://www.box.net/shared/kpdor96hr5
  • Revised version is now in the repository. I'm also starting a new thread for any subsequent discussion of this style.
  • Replying to Bruce about line spacing. The problem is that I can set the correct line spacing in the word processor (Open Office), but as soon as I have to change the bibliography, Zotero overrides the spacing and adds extra line feeds. So there is something in the American Antiquity style that is a problem too (actually a number of things, but maybe this one is fixable).
  • @cmbarton: I thought the spurious line-break issue was fixed. Are you using the latest version of Zotero and the OOo plugin?

    What I'm basically saying is that a) Zotero generated content should be tagged with styles, and b) one should use styles to modifying things like line-spacing.
  • Bruce,

    I do have the latest versions of Zotero and the OO plugin. The problem seems to be in

    <text macro="contributors" display="block"/>

    I'm still working with the squirrelly American Antiquity and American Anthropologist styles. The author section needs to be in a block so that the the rest of the bibliography entry starts with a date, indented below the author.

    I don't know if I'm describing this correctly, but there is a new line at the end of a bibliograraphy entry. That's OK. However, this followed by a hard return (but not a new line) so that the authors (i.e., block) get wrapped onto another line. All of the bib entry (authors and indented date section below it) then is treated like the same paragraph of the empty newline. Yf you create a hanging indent in the word processor, everything (author and the rest of the bib) get indented--because it is all the same paragraph and the 1st line of the paragraph is the empty line between entries. If you manually put your cursor in front of the 1st author and press the backspace to delete this hard return, then you can format the entry OK.

    Michael
  • Maybe the better way to describe this more succinctly is that there seems to be a hard return (no new line) at the beginning and end of a block.
  • Shouldn't every line after the first be indented?
Sign In or Register to comment.