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Whether the "n.d." for "no date" should be manual or automated
As I contemplate the creation of a variant of the CMOS style for use in Zotero--a variant to handle the special needs of genealogists--this question will be important. Currently, if CMOS finds no date in the date field, it forces in "n.d." for "no date" into the formatted citation, at least on many item types. While it's convenient, I find it problematic. The citation that comes from it will tell the world that a date could not be found for the record. But there are a few other possibilities. One is that the researcher got lazy and just failed to put in a date. Another is that the record date is already shown in the title, for some reason, and you do not want to repeat it.
We will already be overriding CMOS code to reformat the date in the standard genealogical format of dd mon yyyy (assuming this experiment in CSL coding allows it). Are there objections to removing the "helpful" insertion of "n.d." by Zotero? This would put the responsibility on us to type n.d. into the date field, if we diligently looked and could determine no date.
Thoughts? Objections?
Personally, I see no problem eliminating the auto-insertion of n.d.
In your contemplations are you considering developing more citation types or altering the ones currently used by CMOS to allow for more flexibility in there use?
I don't think we can add new Item Types, but I am hoping that it will give us a little more control over the ones we have. There are fields we can enter data into that don't appear in the citations. Perhaps we can make those fields usable--allowing us to create the more robust citations easily.
I'm not trying to develop an EE-creation engine, by the way. Looking through the Zotero discussion forums for the last decade, it appears that everyone who set out with that ambition has never been able to deliver it. I think very gentle tweaking of Zotero's CMOS style can get us citations that meet the intent of EE, if not always the letter.
I hope to have a real sense of what we have power over in the next few days. I'm sure I'll be back with questions about how we all form our citations.
Thanks, Donna. I did look at some of those discussions on the forums as well which is why I asked. Even EE says citations are an art and not a science. Many citations can have completely different formats and still meet EE styles.
Exactly. Our goal should be capturing all that is needed, with format secondary. I asked Elizabeth Mills to read the chapter I wrote on EE in the book, and she encouraged me to change all the places I said things like "EE mandates..." or "EE requires....". She said EE is suggested practices, not mandates. It put me much more at ease. When we encounter rigidity on others who are applying it to various practices, it's not what she intended.
There's also the risk, with automating a style, that people will never read the book. And those first chapters in EE are gold. If I was teaching history now, they'd be mandates.
Several years ago while in Arizona I met a student from the University. I don't remember the name of the class but the textbook was EE. The time frame was before EE's second edition.
Her insights on evidence and proof are truly brilliant. I didn't encounter EE and the Genealogy Proof Standard until after I finished my PhD in history. As I saw how much more stringent genealogy is about proof, I wished I had been formally trained in genealogy before I did my PhD. I'm not sure I'd have even done the PhD, to be honest. I love the intricate research we do--like history with a microscope and not a telescope. I think we need both.
As a cataloguer (I'm a librarian), I use n.d. out of habit - for my purposes it works. What I like about Zotero is that we can customize it (to an extent) to how we work.
Thanks, fhtess65, and welcome!
Zotero's CMOS style currently automatically puts an "n.d." into the date field, if you leave it blank. How do you feel about us removing that as an automated feature? One concern some of us had was that we sometimes already have a date in a field elsewhere (often in the title) and don't want to repeat it. It's also possible we just forgot the date, but the n.d. suggests that there was not one on the record--that we chose to reflect that it was missing. Leaving it blank then becomes a more obvious omission--a red flag that we left something out (for better and for worse).
What do you think about forcing ourselves to make a choice to put something in the field, rather than accepting a default of "n.d."? (This would assume we create an alternate version of CMOS with small tweaks to deal with the demands of genealogical citation--like dates in the dd month yy format.)
