3. Citation technique.
This is the third post in a seven-part series about Distance, a quarterly journal for long essays about design. Support Distance on Kickstarter. Earlier posts:
Distance exists in many forms. There’s going to be a book, of course, but we’re also releasing a digital bundle for PDF, ePub, and Kindle formats. The PDF is a different page size than the book, so every single format is going to paginate differently. And because journal citations usually go by pagination, this poses a problem: how do we know we’re referring to the right place in the text?
The Bible actually does this fairly well. You know that John 3:16 is going to be at the same place between differing copies of the same translation (i.e., King James version) of the Bible, no matter what page number it may be on.
So in this spirit, but holiness notwithstanding, Distance doesn’t have page numbers; instead, it has paragraph numbers at the beginning of each paragraph, which direct readers to the right place in the essay. In the PDF and physical book, these are to the left of each paragraph. Kindle’s and ePub’s paragraphs begin with them. And in ePub, Kindle, and PDF, each of these is represented by a permalink that can be used in a specific citation.
We know this isn’t entirely novel, but maybe it is for interactive texts. And we’re well aware that it proscribes a specific citation style that “breaks” traditional citation schemata, which may frustrate some people – but we didn’t take this decision lightly, and think it’s for the betterment of our writing to generalize citation across analog and digital platforms. It’s increasingly unreasonable to assume that readers will keep their content in just one form, and we’re well aware of that, and trying to account for that in the best way that is as reverent to the text and the reader’s habits as possible, meeting everyone halfway.
We take a page at the beginning of each issue of Distance to discuss how citation works for that particular medium, and to advise people on the best way to cite Distance’s essays so that readers and researchers can find what they need as conveniently as possible. We hope this may be helpful for your own research efforts, but we’re always thinking what we can do to improve, so we seek feedback on what works and what doesn’t work for you.
