Re: Robert -- Re: OT: End Note ?

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Robert Holmgren wrote:

> Can't you just filch the database structure that one of these
> programs has already devised? 

Sure. IF one could find it. I've been looking through the files
that constitute Ibid for Xy and can find nothing that looks like
a database structure.
 
> The difficulty is devising the
> template -- the "fields" or blanks that user needs to fill in.
> Once you have this structure, it's a pretty simple matter to use
> XPL to create a fill-in form that reflects this structure, and
> to create a database (really nothing more than a text file, with
> each "record" or citation terminated by a carriage return,

Well, yes, if you want to go the "one big table route." But that
is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. There's a principle of database structure
involved called normal form that demands that, e.g., authors'
names go in one table (because if Robert Holmgren or Patricia M.
Godfrey has written one book or 10, his or her name stays the
same--assuming he or she hasn't used a nom de guerre for some of
them), publishers and dates in another (because publishers are
forever changing their names and merging and what-have-you, so
that Blankety-Blank Press in 1985 may well have become
Megatherium Press in 1986), journals in another (because Medium
AEvum is Medium AEvum regardless of the author and title of the
article), and the only thing that goes in the "main" table is the
title of the work, an ID key to link it to the other items of
data, and the year. Each record is "assembled" by linking the
work with the proper author, publisher, place (or author,
journal, number), with a minimum of duplication. That is,
anything that stays the same is not repeated by linked.
Yes, this sounds like a whole lot of unnecessary gobbledygook to
most people. Trust me, I learned it the hard way, it is
absolutely vital to setting up a database correctly and getting
the data out of it correctly. Relational database and the theory
behind it give us a whole new way of looking at the structure of
reality. And it's what computers are really for. Everything else
is lagniappe. (I sometimes have fantasies of what the medievals
would have done with database had they had the technological
infrastructure to have discovered it.)
 
> As for the style, how hard can that be? Aren't we just talking
> about order & punctuation? You create a few "rules": Chicago 1
> presents the info fields in order X, using punctuation Y;
> Chicago 2; MLA; blah blah blah... Seems simple -- although of
> course you need to know what the rules are!

And capitalization. But I really wonder if they ever got that
right. In traditional "title capitalization," whether a word is
capped or lowercase depends on what part of speech it is. And I
defy any algorithm to correctly identify parts of speech in
English (heck, try and find any human who can nowadays!)
 
> My recollection is that the Ibid installation diskette either
> replaced Editor.exe or used a binary overlay to Editor; and that
> one inherent problem with Ibid was that each time they revised
> the standard Editor, they also had to revise the overlay. I
> think they stopped doing that revision at v4.016 or 4.014.
> Maybe (?) that's why it doesn't work.

Possible, but it wouldn't work even when I first got it. And the
problem appeared to be OOM. If you used the collection of works
that came with the program, it was OK. But once you started
trying to create your own set of works, it would go out to lunch,
run for half an hour, and then crash with a out of memory error
message. IIRC.
 
I tried it yesterday (I have a separate installation on my hard
drive, created in 2005 from an older copy), and it didn't even
get that far. Kept putting High-order characters on the command
line and protesting "too many program calls."
Anyway, I did find the sample bibliography, and it is just the
kind of thing one could do with FISHOUT. Not a properly
normalized set of tables at all. In connection with the month and
7 patches it took our mailing list software to get the thing to
conform to the new USPS regulations, I'm wondering if ANYONE
understands database theory anymore.
 
> Which options are you talking about? Can you give a sense of
> this infinitude?

I'll give you an example. Depending on whether a work is an
article in a journal, a monograph in a series, or a chapter in a
larger work, here's how you'd style it (enjoy the allusions,
Robert, and anyone else who can).
Article in a journal:
Bath-Churchdoor, Alison, and M. Quickly. "Ditchers, Alewives, and
the Primum Mobile: Learned Allusions in Medieval English
Popular Literature." Medium AEvum« 13, 2 (1993): 221.
Monograph in a series:
Bath-Churchdoor, Alison, and M. Quickly. Ditchers, Alewives,
and the Primum Mobile: Learned Allusions in Medieval
English Popular Literature. Yarmouth University Papers in the
History of England 16 (Yarmouth: Yarrow Press, 1994).
Chapter in a book:
Bath-Churchdoor, Alison, and M. Quickly. "Ditchers, Alewives, and
the Primum Mobile: Learned Allusions in Medieval English
Popular Literature." In The Roman Pavement: The Persistence of
Classical Culture in Medieval Europe, ed. Eglantine Prior,
325-60. Stratford at Bow: Pertelote Press, 1997.
Note that in some styles, the authors would be given as
Bath-Churchdoor, Alison, and Quickly, M.

--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx