Creating a citation in a Facebook Post

By Anonymous on Tue, 11/22/2016 - 10:41

Forums

Hello,

I searched the forums for Facebook but all I could find was information about citing a Facebook post. Lets say I am posting information, a section or part of my research on Facebook. The paragraph has several citations for the facts. How do you add a citation in a Facebook post?  Do you add the citations at the end of the post? Add a link if the information can be found online? What about facts not found online?

Thank you 

Ann Gilchrest

Submitted byEEon Tue, 11/22/2016 - 19:42

Ann, Facebook does limit our citations in frustrating ways—say, the inability to use italics to indicate the titles of publications—so we have to use "old fashioned" work arounds. At the Facebook page for my Louisiana State University Press book The Forgotten People: Cane River's Creoles of Color, I'm running a series called "Bits of Evidence" in which I post documents, translations, or accounts of events, all supported by source citations. They cover a wide range of original documents and print pubs, as well as online databases and images. You might scroll back through those past "Bits of Evidence" to see how different types of sources are handled there.

Submitted byACProctoron Wed, 11/23/2016 - 03:22

I hope you don't mind me joining in, and having a good whinge. There's nothing better on a cold, frosty morning.

I come across this most often when adding to an informal search log, and I use the old-style italic indicators:

    /something-in-italics/

I understand Ann's frustration with FB, which was really designed as an informal social medium, but they're not alone in their deficiencies. The lack of support for footnotes and footnote indicators -- requiring them to be manually formed -- also applies to sites that provide support for stories/memories, and most blogs.

I found a way of doing this for my Blogger.com articles using Microsoft Word as the formatting engine, but it not only meant jumping through hoops, it meant going against the grain and ignoring the many people who said that cannot be done.

Tony

Submitted byEEon Wed, 11/23/2016 - 08:00

Thanks, Tony, for being a 'good whinge' mood and extending our options to discuss. The use of the virgule before and after a title, to indicate italics, is one we don't often see here in the U.S.  Here, the virgule is commonly used to indicate alternatives, to create fractions, or to indicate line divisions in poetry. More often here we see the use of the underscore before the title, as in _The Forgotten People: Cane River's Creoles of Color_. Even that raises questions among non-researchers who are not familiar with the custom.