TUESDAY’S TEST: Citing Complicated Web Sources—EE’s Answer

4 June 2014

Yesterday's test question seemed easy: You’ve found a print book replicated online and it carries a great quote you want to cite. Here’s the link to the book page. http://home.ku.edu.tr/~mbaker/hist103/FuraySalevouris/FuraySalevourisChap9.pdf. How would you cite the book that provides the quote?

The issues involved, of course, were not so simple. Even more daunting is the thought that many of the materials we find online present similar issues we have to work through—not just to create a workable citation but also to determine whether or not we should even use this particular source.  Let's tackle two of the issues:

Problem 1: Which edition of Furay and Salevouris are we quoting?

Nowhere in the digital file at this link can we identify either the authors or the publication data. When we backtrack the link, we discover that these are PDF pages posted by a university professor as “outside reading” for students. In posting the images from Furay and Salevouris, the professor added, vertically in the margin of most pages, a copyright notice: “Copyright © 2010 Harlan Davidson, Inc.” 

By running a catalog search at the Library of Congress or WorldCat, we find a 2010 edition (“3^rd edition”) by Harlan Davidson.  If we run a search at Amazon.com, however, we find that 3^rd edition attributed to the publisher Wiley-Blackwell, under a date of 2009. That discrepancy points to the dangers inherent in trying to identify a partially-cited source without actually using the source.

Meanwhile, if we probe the professor’s own webpages to find his syllabus for the course, we find him citing the book’s second edition, not the third. It also raises a question as to why the identification in the professor’s marginal note does not match the data he provides in course syllabus to the class.

Problem 2: Who are Furay and Salevouris actually “citing”?

As Yvette points out in her "answer" to yesterday's test, we should cite what we use. That’s F&S. Therefore, we begin our citation with F&S. Then we would add  “Citing …” to identify the source from which F&S takes the quote. While F&S attribute the quote to T. E. Lawrence, they aren’t actually citing Lawrence. Instead they have cited another publication that we need to identify. However, F&S’s citation to that earlier work, as it appears here in Chapter 9, is a short citation. We are still left with the problem of identifying fully their source, which also comes in several editions—any one of which could vary from another.

So: What would EE cite?

Considering that citation is an art, not a science, EE’s "working notes" citation would reflect at least some of these problems—if for no other reason than to warn us, at a future date after our memory of this source has gone cold, why this source would not be the best one to cite:

This particular version of the often-varied T. E. Lawrence quote is provided by Conal Furay and Michael J. Salevouris in The Methods and Skills of History: A Practical Guide, 2nd ed. (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 2000), 139, citing "Barzun and Graff, Modern Researcher, 50”; PDF images posted online by Mark Baker, Ph.D., University of Kansas, for the course “HIST 103: Introduction to History” (http://home.ku.edu.tr/~mbaker/hist103/FuraySalevouris/FuraySalevourisChap9.pdf : accessed 30 May 2014). Furay and Salevouris’s monograph exists in several editions. Although Baker has posted all chapters to the book, he does not post a title page to identify the edition he is presenting. On most of his posted images he has added a marginal notice: “Copyright 2010 Harlan Davidson, Inc.” and a new edition did appear at Harlan Davidson that year.  However, Baker’s course syllabus (http://home.ku.edu.tr/~mbaker/Hist103/Hist103syl.html), which provides a hotlink to chapter 9, informs the students that they are using F&S's second edition, not the third.

Also note: Only some of the Furay and Salevouris chapters that Baker has posted obscurely (without a home page or landing page) are accessible via hotlinks in the syllabus. No link is provided for chapters 1 and 2. Both are locatable by altering the Chapter 9 link, substituting “1” and “2” for  the number “9." That effort reveals (at Chapter 1, p. 6) that Furay and Salevouris are citing a very early edition of Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff’s classic work, The Modern Researcher (New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970).

While we need this background data in our working notes, we would rarely publish a citation of this sort unless—as here—it’s used for instructional purposes. To create a citation to this Lawrence quote, in standard publication format, EE would do as DZochert has recommended in his response of yesterday, backtrack the quote to its manuscript form or its first publication and then cite that source directly.

Now, EE will leave you with one other thought:

How do you feel about the fact that the professor has published online image copies of what seems to be the entirety of a published work that is marketed to students?  Even though the chapters are posted in a rather obscure fashion, anyone interested in the book can easily find the chapters through Google or Bing. We are assuming that the professor has obtained the permission of the publisher. If you were doing the same on your own webpages, where and how would you make clear the fact that you have obtained permission?