Surmised attributes

CSL Development
#1

Does CSL offer a way to flag attributes such as authors, publication dates,
and publication locations as surmised or inferred? I didn’t see anything in
the schema.

In my field of early modern history, such details are often not supplied on
the book itself and must be guessed or inferred.

When they can be determined, such attributes are typically placed within
square brackets, sometimes with question marks when the attribution is
questionable

Here is a citation (or two actually) in a footnote from a book I’m currently
reading (italics in uppercase):

[F. K. Hunt], “A Few Facts about Matrimony,” in Charles Dickens, ed.,
HOUSEHOLD WORDS, 1 (1850), p. 374 (for authorship, see Anne Lohrli, comp.,
HOUSEHOLD WORDS [Toronto, 1973], p.319).

A writer couldn’t just stick brackets in an author field, for the first
book’s author should be “[Hunt, F. K.]” (and alphabetized without regard for
the brackets) in the bibliography.

For the second book, if the date and location each had brackets, we’d get
[Toronto], [1973]. (Even if a citation processor wasn’t smart enough to
combine these, it seems the CSL should make such combining possible.)

John

#2

John,

Does CSL offer a way to flag attributes such as authors, publication
dates, and publication locations as surmised or inferred? I didn’t see
anything in the schema.

No, and the thing is, this is an issue that ties together the styling
language and data model. E.g. it’s not just a CSL issue.

In fact, if I was going to be lazy, I’d say it’s really not my problem;
if someone wants to do an approximate date, it’s not CSL’s job to worry
about how it’s represented.

I don’t believe that though, and would prefer to find a better way.

In my field of early modern history, such details are often not
supplied on the book itself and must be guessed or inferred.

Yes, I know.

When they can be determined, such attributes are typically placed
within square brackets, sometimes with question marks when the
attribution is questionable

Here is a citation (or two actually) in a footnote from a book I’m
currently reading (italics in uppercase):

[F. K. Hunt], “A Few Facts about Matrimony,” in Charles Dickens, ed.,
HOUSEHOLD WORDS, 1 (1850), p. 374 (for authorship, see Anne Lohrli,
comp., HOUSEHOLD WORDS [Toronto, 1973], p.319).

A writer couldn’t just stick brackets in an author field, for the
first book’s author should be “[Hunt, F. K.]” (and alphabetized
without regard for the brackets) in the bibliography.

For the second book, if the date and location each had brackets, we’d
get [Toronto], [1973]. (Even if a citation processor wasn’t smart
enough to combine these, it seems the CSL should make such combining
possible.)

As I say above, this is kind of a PITA. For example, on the data
modeling side, we’d need:

- for Zotero, say, to be able to say when some data is inferred,

opproximate, etc.
- same for the RDF

But so how to do this? Is an inferred publisher in fact a different
kind of relation? A different kind of datatype in the case of dates?
E.g. in RDF N3 notation, are we doing:

http://ex.net/1
dc:date “-0534”^^http://dates.org/inferredYear ;
x:inferredPublisher http://ex.net/2 .

…? Or:

http://ex.net/1
x:inferredDate “-0534”^^xsd:gYear ;
x:inferredPublisher http://ex.net/2 .

And how to deal with it in CSL? You’re right; CSL would at least have
to understand the concept of inferred or approximate data.

I don’t think the answers are that straight-forward.

Bruce