Master thesis nitty-gritty
I'm working on my master's thesis, and I'm starting to get into a situation where I find that the current system I'm using for sources and references (an overly complicated endnote system) is not doing it for me, and I keep running into problems, so I'm considering options for a new system before I have to redo 100 pages of references. I've never really been very consistent with reference systems, and I've never really found one that I prefer over others.
Do you have any tips? What system did/do you use? Why does it/doesn't it work for you?
4 Comments:
I have three A4-notebooks with handwritten notes, works per-fect-ly.
I use a kind of MLA style, commonly used in the dept. of English. The charm of this style is that you can get away with writing very little, in the way of notes, in the text proper. One simply writes a page number (23) in paranthesis, or you add the author's name if he/she is not mentioned elsewhere in the text. The idea is that the context tells you what work you're referring to. There will be parentheses inserted in the text, but they will be short and unintrusive. Notes, which I prefer to have at the bottom of the page, are only used if there is additional information that for some reason does not fit into the text. Full technical information about the works (year of release, publisher, etc.) appears only once: in the "Works Cited" list; the very last part of the thesis.
The challenge for you, of course, is to find out how to easily refer to text in a HTML document, since there usually are no page numbers. If you figure this out, we all want to know about it.
Well, if it's a quote, you just point at the page, and have the reader scan the page himself with the "find" option in his browser, looking for the exact wording of the text. If it's just a reference, an influence that won't work, obviously. But with blogs, it really isn't that hard, since each blog post generates its own little permalink subpage.
It's actually pretty silly that you can't make links directly to a specific line of code in other people's html.
Et evig problem!
Sjøl bruker jeg Chicago-et-eller-annet, som er mye brukt i lingvistikken. Denne har også alle ref. i parentes i løpende tekst, noe som er ufattelig mye greiere enn fotnoter. sjekk f.eks. ut klassiskfilologenes fotnoter som er den rene skrekken.
Jeg har også prød Endnote, men ga det opp, mye fordi jeg skriver på fransk, og endnote er tilpasset anglo-amerikanske normer. Så da blir det stort sett klipp og lim, som forsåvidt funker bra, sjøl om det er litt tungvint og jeg må rote rundt i gamle dok for å finne dem. Her er det også et generelt språkprobl, så personlig skulle jeg ønske det fantes et system der man enkelt kunne svitsje mellom språk.
Håper du har det fint i Berlin, forresten!
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