Citation Style help needed - Anthropology (AAA)

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  • docbillingsley
    I'm inclined to agree with you, but the AAA is far from being the most tech-savvy academic institution. It's actually quite embarrassing, some of the glitches and truly awful design elements of their website and the members' only sections.

    Perhaps the next time I'm able to attend the annual meeting, I'll try and figure out who is responsible for maintaining the style guidelines and see if there's a process for revision.
  • bdarcus
    edited July 6, 2011
    Just to be really clear about my suggestion above in terms of implementation, I am NOT meaning anything about "tab stops." I mean simply that blocks could be "indented" (with a positive left margin) or to have a hanging indent. Essentially, this would tell the processor to pass off style instructions to the output.

    By way of example, then, maybe in HTML output you'd have:

    <div class="bib-item csl-indent">1981 The Dialogic Imagination.
    Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Austin:
    University of Texas Press.</div>
    ... and:

    .csl-indent { margin-left: 2em; }

    Seems to me a pretty elegant solution to the problem?
  • adamsmith
    right - I understood what you wrote above - I was just curious how the current AAA style is achieved when people do this by hand and if people have found a way to semi-automate that (i.e. using paragraph/style settings for Word/Ooo) - the answers is pretty clearly no, you basically need those tab stops - which I agree are ugly and probably undesirable.

    I like your solution of assigning separate styles to blocks if that's feasible.
  • cmbarton
    I just spent a couple fruitless hours working on the American Antiquity style, which is based on the AAA style to see if anything has changed with CSL 1. With regards to these styles, it has not, at least in terms of what Zotero is able to process. There still remain several problems.

    1) There is not a carriage return after a block. So it you try to set hanging indents in the word processor, it treats an entire bibliographic entry as a single chunk of contiguous text. Everything after the first line in an entry is then indented, regardless of whether or not it is in separate blocks.

    2. second-field-align does not yet work and right-inline can only follow a left-margin entry. And neither are allowed or work with a hanging indent bibliography.

    So that means that there still is no way I can see to get the 3-tiered bibliography structure needed in this style (shown in the 19 May post of adamsmith), either directly created by Zotero or by setting hanging indents in a word processor.
  • fbennett
    Although we haven't gotten there yet, we would like to get full service going for this category of styles. One of the difficulties is that addressing the indenting issues requires formatting that varies between markup languages. It would help to move this forward if we had a sample in our two main output languages -- HTML and RTF -- of a short sample bibliography that is correctly formatted, without regard to what is provided by Zotero. We should be able to work backwards from that to figure out what hints the processor needs to provide, and what markup should be derived from those hints by Zotero proper.
  • bdarcus
    Yeah, @cmbarton, I'm thinking it might help to post a before and after screenshot that shows a) what default output is, and b) what it looks after you modify it to be what you expect.
  • docbillingsley
    I created a few sample bibliographies, in .docx, .rtf. and .htm (Word export). There are the preformatted ones that Zotero spits out, as well as the postformatted ones that I adjusted to reflect the peculiar tab indentations with the hanging indent. I hope this helps.

    You can access them here, individually or zipped: http://db.tt/mtoGMl9

    Note that I tried but failed to find a way to format the bibliography all at once. I had to manually adjust each entry/paragraph for it to appear correctly. If anyone wants a step by step walkthrough, I can provide it.
  • docbillingsley
    I went ahead and created a short word document describing how I formatted the bibliography, and threw in a screenshot of a genuine AAA bibliography for good measure.
  • bdarcus
    So I'll just make one observation about the docx output (as interpreted by LibreOffice): every paragraph in the bibliography has the same paragraph style ("Bibliography").

    I would think ideally, we'd have a root "Bibliography" style, and then some variants based on it: "Bibliography-Hanging" and "Bibliography-Indent".

    I think the other issue you're referring to is the alignment and indenting on the content to the right of the date. IIRC, that may be easier to do in HTML/CSS than in a word-processor. Still, if that's the case, I'll bet this is less critical than other issues (from my conversations with people who have worked for academic publishers).
  • cmbarton
    While it is desirable to submit a MS with proper bibliographic format, I suspect you are right that academic publishers can probably fix it if need be. The much larger audience with perhaps a greater need is all the students doing MA and Phd theses that are required to use these styles (e.g., American Anthropologist and American Antiquity).

    The formatting could be done in a word processor--without editing each entry manually--if a hard return could be inserted between successive blocks. Then block 1 (authors) could be flush left, block 2 (beginning with date) could be indented, and a hanging indent could be set in the word processor to further indent subsequent lines.

    Here is are LibreOffice versions of Zotero output unmodified and with a hard return inserted between the 2 blocks of the entry to allow word processor formatting.

    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7437464/American-antiquity-unmodified.odt
    http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7437464/American-antiquity-modified.odt
  • docbillingsley
    Inspired by the comments about 'Styles,' I have been playing around in Word 2010 to create a 'AAA Bibliography' style based on the postformatted .docx document that I shared a few posts back. However, I can't get it to recognize the hanging indentation correctly. It moves the date/year too far over. Otherwise it looks pretty close.
    I've added that document to the dropbox folder. http://db.tt/mtoGMl9
  • cmbarton
    To get Word (or other word processor) to properly apply a hanging indent, you have to replace the line feed with a carriage return after each author group. Put your cursor at the left margin to the left of the date, hit delete/backspace, press return. Now the date will go wherever you set the first left tab and the rest will go where you put the hanging indent. In LibreOffice, you can do this in batch if you use regular expressions, but I always forget what the expression is to do it.
  • adamsmith
    Word also has regular expressions for search and replace - but that's more advanced than I'd want this. If we could tell users "apply this style to the bib to get proper AAA formatting" that'd be more or less OK with me. but telling the users "use this complicated search and replace, but only for the bibliography and then apply this style - that's too much even for my taste.
    I'll have to look at these in more detail, but I might be OK in hardcoding the indent _before_ the year in spaces, because those would be stable width. Would that help?
  • cmbarton
    Doesn't work. I've already tried that. This is because the date line behaves like a continuation of the author line for any hanging indent. If Zotero would insert a carriage return after the block, all would be fine. But without that, there is no way to do the proper 3-level indent using the word processor format (unless you insert the carriage return in the word processor).
  • adamsmith
    right, but we don't want Zotero to do this by default because of the line-spacing / entry-spacing distinction, so this will need to get solved a different way, probably along the lines suggested by Bruce/bdarcus above. Unfortunately that means waiting for a csl update which may take a while.
  • cmbarton
    OK. That's too bad. I was hoping the new CSL would fix this, but the Zotero processor is not reading the needed CSL code correctly in this case. It also affects another style that I need - Advances in Complex Systems. The version now in the repository is wildly wrong due to the CSL processor bug.
  • adamsmith
    those are different issues - the bug that's affecting ACS is a processor bug that will be fixed in the next Zotero release and is already fixed on the branch.
    But I don't understand how the AAA issue is a processor bug. What isn't csl reading correctly? It just can't deal with double hanging indents, which, I'll say again, I find a rather absurd formatting requirement in the first place. If the subsequent line(s) alligned with the year all of this would work just fine with one little tweak to Word/Ooo's bibliography style.
  • cmbarton
    second-field-align does not work AFAICT. If it did, I think it would solve the AAA issue.

    Author block at left margin
    Date and rest of bib block with display=indent and second-field-align=flush
  • adamsmith
    you still wouldn't get the extra indent in the lines following the date, which seems like the biggest obstacle to me.

    Second-field align does work for what it's designed for originally - the citation numbers of numerical styles and other citation labels (with the exception of the bug you note, which, as noted, has since been fixed). It doesn't seem to play well with the display/block functions.
  • cmbarton
    Issues of working with display/block styles aside, wouldn't second-field-align line up the left margin of the rest of the citation with the field following the date if applied to that block? You would need to have date and the rest of the citation all in the same block of course. This seems directly analogous to the numerical citation style you describe.
  • adamsmith
    well, but if you look at the style guide that's not actually what it requires - subsequent lines start roughly below the 3rd number of the year. Also, second-field-align can't be applied to blocks per csl specifications I believe. It currently only exists as a bibliography option, so if it worked the year would be the second field and subsequent lines could align with the year - but that effect is already pretty easy to achieve by using a Word/Ooo style.
  • cmbarton
    OK. That is not clear (to me at least) in the CSL specs. I read it to say that the rest of the entry lines up with the second field . This would be the title in the AAA style. However, you are right that if it doesn't work in a block it all is moot.
  • adamsmith
    we talked past each other. By "if it worked" I meant "if second field-align as a bibliography option correctly worked with display functions" (which it doesn't) you could get everything to align with the year. That part I believe isn't clear from the specs.

    The fact that it can't be applied to blocks, on the other hand, is pretty clear to me, as it's specifically listed as a bibliography option and nowhere else in the specs.
    If it _did_ work with blocks, you're right, you could get it to align with the title, but as noted above, that wouldn't actually help for AAA style.
  • cmbarton
    I follow you here.
  • fbennett
    From tinkering around with the sample files and saving things as RTF, I think I've figured out a simple markup strategy for this. It just needs a block-indent tab and first-line reverse-tab on the date + cite blocks, which looks simple enough to stick in the output.

    I can set up the processor to apply this where "left-margin" and "right-inline" elements follow a "block" element. This would provide tab markers in the word processor that can be adjusted to achieve the desired indenting.

    The drawback would be that (I think) the tab settings would need to be adjusted on every entry, which is far from ideal. I don't know enough about RTF to figure out how to tie those settings to a named style (if that is possible). Input from someone who knows RTF well would be very helpful here.
  • fbennett
    I've at least taken a look at styles in the RTF output in a document with a generated bibliography. I see a style declaration in the RTF for "Bibliography 1", which seems to correspond to the "Bibliography-1" style shown in the word processor (LibreOffice in this case). However, I don't see code for the style declaration in the source of Zotero (although quite possibly I just don't know where to look).

    As Bruce mentioned earlier in the thread, a proper solution will require that we declare a discrete style on the author header (the "block" element) and on the citation body (the "left-margin" / "right-inline" pair). The desired effect can be produced in the processor output easily enough, but we'll need a means of setting up a "Bibliography-2" style in the word processor if it is not already present.

    As I noted earlier, that will require input from Simon; in addition to setting up the style in the WP, we'll need to work out some mechanism for assigning the style to particular chunks of processor string output.
  • fbennett
    Okay, I think I have the full picture now. There is an API command to the document plugins, "setBibliographyStyle()", which initializes the values of the "Bibliography-1" style (in LibreOffice, maybe the style name is slightly different in other word processors). The command is compiled into the plugin itself. To add a second style declaration to target documents will require a change to the plugin API, either by adding another command, or by extending the syntax of setBibliographyStyle().

    In either case, this issue can't be addressed from within the citation processor. You'll have to wait until Simon is able to find time to make the necessary changes across the family of plugins. Given the pace of other work in Zotero Everywhere of late, that might be awhile; but the issue is now well understood and the path to a solution is clear, and it's safe to say that a fix will be forthcoming in due course.
  • mayilo
    hello,
    excuse my english, i am studing on sorbonne university in paris, i am looking for some newspapper article or articles of magazine about two authors american anthropologie, sapir and whorf hypothesis, specially in language relativity. thank's first for help.
  • adamsmith
    mayilo - this is a technical support forum for the Zotero bibliographic software. You'll have to look for advice on academic questions elsewhere.
  • mayilo
    thank's a lot mr adam smith

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