Introduction by
I like that I can select different kinds of "authors" like the translator and editor, but I would also like to see a category for "Introduction by."
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If you need to cite the introduction, then enter it as a book section. If you don't, then you can include that information in a note?
Moreover, if supported, it would result in more complex styles.
Note: I'm open to changing my mind, but I really think there are bigger and more important fish to fry before we worry about all the eccentricities of some styles (like Chicago).
We would no doubt all agree that it would be useful to have a full list of contributor relations: editor, translator, director, speaker, etc., etc.
In principle this is all good, so long as your processing tools know what to do with them (whether to treat a director, say, a like an author, or something else, and so forth).
But "introduced by" is in fact a completely different logic. It refers to the author of a component part of the resource in question; NOT the resource per se. It would be equivalent to saying "cover photograph by" or "second chapter translated by."
If you think about it from a GUI perspective, I once mentioned the idea to have a hierarchical resource list that matched the new hierarchical model we'll see. So if you clicked on an edited book, you'd see the entered chapters as children of the book.
Does it make more sense in that context that Spivak be listed as a contributor field in the main record, or that her introduction be listed as a full class record in the child list?
[edit: actually extending this further, how to deal with things like original publication titles, dates, publishers, etc. for translated historical works? Are they all just simple fields in the main record, or are they full related resources?]
It also looks like the guides are positioning these supplementary contributions where edition information would go. I can see some logic to that: It's not the second or the revised edition, but the edition with Spivak's introduction.
If Spivak's introduction is what's being cited, then yes, it should be cited and listed in the bibliography as a book section, but otherwise maybe "with introduction by Spivak" could just be entered in the book's edition field. If so, no new field is required.
Answering my own question, BTW, the way you deal with it is to treat the original resource as a full object, and explicitly relate them (resource A is version of resource B or some such).
I'd agree with you that this funky stuff (and let's be clear, it *is* funky) may be a convention to disambiguate potentially different editions of a work, where something like explicit version information is missing.
I'm agnostic about the user experience of this, but I feel strongly that simply "adding introduced by" as some new creator type is a step backwards that is actually in conflict with the new hierarchical model.
I think the way forward is a flexible list of contributor types, which themselves can be classified, probably drawing on FRBR distinctions between:
1. works (creators)
2. expressions (e.g. edition or versions; think editors and translators), and
3. manifestations (producers, like publishers)
Different kinds of contributors can then be hooked up to different kinds of fields, and import/export and formatting can be handled reliably.
Just thinking out loud ...
It seems "creator" is a person (or institution) whose relationship to the work is significant, even if this person only contributed to an aspect or part of the work. For example, most people wouldn't enter the film "Paris, je t'aime," made of 20 five-minute movies, as 20 items--it would be one "film" item with all 20 directors included. That's what IMDB does; actually, it lists 22 directors, including those who worked on transitions between segments. Then "Paris, je t'aime" would be one of the hits when you search for films by Joel Coen, which is what you want as a researcher. This is mostly relevant to GUI/search though--you may well be right about the need for more precise RDF import/export. Still, it may just not be feasible to create a perfect schema for all multipart sources including the ones discussed here--this may be the case where consistency is a hobgoblin of neverending ontology projects.
An editor or translator or recipient or a publisher, then, is not a creator. Using FRBR's somewhat awkward language to explain this, they have different kinds of relations to the resources in question. An editor or translator, for example, have major roles in the realization of expressions of works (say an English language text), and a publisher with the production of particular manifestations (the hard copy product I buy at Amazon).
This is why, BTW, these roles typically get labeled as such in formatted bibliographic entries; because they are not really creators/authors, but perhaps stand in for them (in the case, for example, of edited books, where the editor is used for sorting and labeling). So a formatting system also has to understand this too to work well. Right, and also about GUI data entry. Beyond limited data models that don't physically allow them to store the data hierarchically (say in IMDB) another reason why a cataloguer/entry person might choose not to enter each of the 20 short films probably has a lot to do with awkward editing interfaces that means it takes 20 times as much work. But if, for sake of argument, that problem could be fixed, users wouldn't likely care I presume.
Thanks in advance for any help/clarification.
Also, is Robinson the editor too?
In any case, I think you're probably stuck with having to be creative (like maybe adding the main author name to the title?).
The current way a book section is handled is simply to allow a range of contributors to be attached to the section. The problem is this leaves no way to distinguish different authors: the author of the resource proper (the introduction) and that of the container resource (the collection of short stories).
Dinnage, Rosemary. Introduction to _Memoirs of my Nervous Illness_. By Daniel Paul Schreber. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2000. xi-xxiv.
Or a far more complicated one:
Derrida, Jacques. "Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok." 1976. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Foreword to The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonomy. By Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. xi-xlvii.
I can't see how you would get this citation from the current configuration of the Book Section item type on Zotero. I have managed to configure Endnote to create such citations though -- it would be useful to be able to do the same on Zotero.
And yes, it *is* very important to be able to cite introductions and forewords, since in many cases in the humanities, introductions and forewords are significant pieces of research in themselves, often equivalent in value and originality to a journal article.
I think the best way to handle it is to build on the planned new "hierarchical" model. An introduction, then, might be a kind of "book section." Upon choosing that "Book Introduction" (say) type, you'd enter the information about the introduction proper. When you get to the fields for the book, you'd have some UI magic that would allow you to automatically select a pre-existing book, or to create a new one.
From the CSL perspective, we probably just need to add a "container-author" (and perhaps "part-author") variable.
Pat
simon
According to the 7th ed. of Turabian, I need something like this:
Cornelius Plantinga Jr., foreword to Jesus and the Father: Modern Evangelicals Reinvent the Doctrine of the Trinity, by Kevin Giles (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 8.
The best way I see to handle it currently is to enter this as a book section. Then I get this:
Cornelius Plantinga Jr., “foreword,” in Jesus and the Father: Modern Evangelicals Reinvent the Doctrine of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 8.
So I just need to strip out the quotation marks, replace in with to, and add the book author after the title. Not a huge deal, but not ideal either.
For example, I want to cite the introduction of the complete works of a writer, so I created "Introduction" as a book chapter, putting introduction-author as the author, _Complete works_ as the book-title, but there is no way to also input the book-author?... I read the previous posts, but not sure if something has been done to fix this yet and the discussion has not been updated? Would appreciate a confirmation.
Thank you very much.
And are there plans to map this field to biblatex's bookauthor field for BibTeX import/export?