citation style for Tweets

CSL Development
1

Hi,

The MLA is introducing a new format for Tweets. Would this require a
new Type in CSL?

  • Ian
2

Hi,

The MLA is introducing a new format for Tweets. Would this require a
new Type in CSL?

How Do You Cite a Tweet in an Academic Paper? - The Atlantic

  • Ian

No need for a new type, but (off the top of my head) applications will
need a means of recording the time, cs:date will need to be able to
handle it, and cs:if and cs:else-if will need to be able to test for
the presence of a time on the date object.

Frank

3

Man that’s a really dumb format the MLA is adding. Why no URL? Why
privilege Twitter?

To your point, we could cover it with the existing generic “document” type.

4

Why no URL?

For direct Tweet links, I’m not sure that would be all that useful -
it seems quite likely to me that a URL issued in 2012 will not work
5 years hence. A combination of name + keywords + date on the other
hand can be used as a search query.

Regards,
Rob.

5

Is it reasonable to assume all tweets will be available in five years such
that one can find them?

BTW, don’t we have CSL “post”? If yes, that’d work.

6

I think ‘post’ would be perfect.

It’s very interesting that the entire tweet is contained in the
citation. I guess it means that there is no need for a link, as the
content of the tweet is already expressed fully in the citation.

  • Ian
7

Oh, I missed that it includes the content. That’s definitely a bit more
sensible.

OTOH, I don’t think we have a variable appropriate to that.

8

See my comment on that thread - APA and CMoS have provided guidelines
for that already:

APA:
BarackObama. (2009a, July 15). Launched American Graduation Initiative
to help additional 5 mill. Americans graduate college by 2020:
http://bit.ly/gcTX7 [Twitter post]. Retrieved from
http://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/2651151366

CMoS:
2. Garrett Kiely, Twitter post, September 14, 2011, 8:50 a.m.,
http://twitter.com/gkiely.

I’m not inclined to worry much about this - we might want to look at
having a “type/genre” field available as “post” gets implemented (it’s
not currently in Zotero, hence not in any citation style) to include
"Tweet" (really MLA???) or “Twitter Post”.

9

@bruce: did you mean which CSL variable to use for the content of the tweet? Wouldn’t the title field be all we need?

10

@bruce: did you mean which CSL variable to use for the content of the tweet? Wouldn’t the title field be all we need?

I suppose. But it does abuse the meaning of title a bit.

11

Zotero’s Twitter translator already uses the title field for the content.
It uses type blogpost- not sure what that maps to in the CSL world.

Avram

12

blogpost currently maps to webpage in Zotero (and so that’s how it’s
implemented in styles) - we could think about changing that to post or
weblog-post (though do we really need both of these types to existing
in csl?

13

I think this example demonstrates that yes, we do need both.

Or, if we want to contemplate cutting one, it should be the narrower
one (“weblog-post”).

Bruce