New Character(s) Challenge - Annotations

[kentlew]

Riccardo's concept echoes something I was thinking, in terms of making an ordered system that is somewhat intuitive:

 
The higher values get more difficult to distinguish.

I like what Riccardo's example suggests a little better. But I would skip that first "minus" and start with the second for the first order, maybe give it a "plus" form.

[quadibloc]

I wasn't aware of the use of the number sign/pound sign/octothorpe # for annotation, but the section sign, the paragraph sign, and parallels have already been mentioned here.

I suppose that one could suggest the degree symbol, because it is already present, and, like the asterisk, raised!

But while some of the suggestions for new symbols made here are certainly interesting, I suspect that in practice there would be resistance to any change.

Still, I'd like to make a very modest suggestion, much less original and visually interesting than the ones presented so far, but perhaps more practical. In contexts where a significant number of annotations are present, but superscript numerals would cause confusion (maybe one is footnoting an equation, where they might be confused with raising a number to a power)... perhaps one could simply use raised boxed or circled numerals.

And then there's always raised Greek letters (lowercase).

[kentlew]

> (maybe one is footnoting an equation, where they might be confused with raising a number to a power)

This is precisely the kind of situation where Chicago prescribes symbols:

"§13.50 Other reference marks. For a table that includes mathematical or chemical equations, where superior letters or numerals might be mistaken for exponents, a series of arbitrary symbols may be used . . . as follows:"

And the recommended sequence of symbols is that which I cited previously.

[John Hudson]

Bill: This is so much cleaner than past methods that I don’t think they can compete.

Agreed. Most of the scholarly books I've seen recently insert citations in the text, use the bottom of the page for critical apparatus, and end notes for explanatory notes or commentary.

Critical apparatus quite often involves a lot of different reference points on a single page, so numbers are the obvious choice. Which leaves the problem of how to reference explanatory end notes. My idea -- which I doubt is original -- is to use marginal reference numbers.

[eliason]

This is so much cleaner than past methods that I don’t think they can compete.

I might disagree with that. Is interrupting my paragraph with parenthetical citations really "cleaner"? Maybe this is a case of We Like Best What We Read Most, but I prefer foot- or endnotes (as are still used quite broadly in my field of art history).

In cases where citations and explanatory notes are divided into different systems of notation, how does one handle an explanatory note that also requires a citation, or a citation that also requires an explanatory note (both of which are likely to appear frequently in what I read and write)?

As for the new character challenge, here's my unserious submission:

[hrant]

Kent, I likin' it.

> there would be resistance to any change.

That's only normal. Nonetheless trying is normal too!

> This is so much cleaner than past methods
> that I don’t think they can compete.

Nah, I'm with Craig. You should give the reader a choice of ignoring the side-trip; putting anything more than a non-linguistic symbol ruins that.

hhp

[quadibloc]

As for the new character challenge, here’s my unserious submission:

It's missing a fifth symbol: a set of three wavy lines next to each other.

Ah, I see my memory was wrong. That would have been true if the triangle was instead a five-pointed star, and the X was a plus sign.

[William Berkson]

>Is interrupting my paragraph with parenthetical citations really “cleaner”?

Yes, here's why. Citations this way are clearly citations, and being in parentheses can be skipped by the eye. When you have everything in foot or end notes, you don't know whether they are explanatory or simply citations, so you annoyingly have to go hunting to see whether it's something significant to your interests.

Where explanatory notes go should depend on the work, and the author's notion of their function, which he or she should be clear about. Then it may make sense to have them as end notes, side notes, or footnotes.

I think the separation of citations and explanatory notes has been a real advance in layout of scholarly works.

You could also do citations as numbered end notes, and explanations as side or foot notes. The most important thing I think is the separation of the two, whatever device you use.

[nina]

[This belongs under William Berkson's post.]

"and being in parentheses can be skipped by the eye"

Not really all that easy to skip'em though. You have to spot the opening parenthesis, then decide it's a citation and not a parenthesized statement that you're actually supposed to read inline with the text*, and then find the closing parenthesis. Seems to make for a lot of stop-and-go while reading.
* To help this distinction I've previously used all small caps with small caps parentheses for the citations – makes the skippin' a little easier, but they still seem to stand in the way of smooth text flow.

"When you have foot or end notes, you don’t know whether they are explanatory or simply citations, so you annoyingly have to go hunting to see whether it’s something significant to your interests."

Which is exactly why it'd be cool to have distinctive markers for the two. That's smart typography if you ask me (and not really that hard to "learn").

Speaking of smart, I DIG Riccardo's Chinese-influenced ones!

[hrant]

{Will you two stop editing -and thereby sending down- your posts?! :-}

Kent, I propose taking the system you show above and limiting each star to one of three symbols: 3, 4 and 5* spokes. With two symbols per mark you have 3^2 = 9 choices, which seems pretty decent.

* A 6 might be too hard to quickly tell apart from the 5.

So it would progress something like this:

3
3

3
4

3
5

4
3

4
4

4
5

5
3

5
4

5
5

However I would propose that a given page not go sequentially through that list, but instead exclude parts as needed. For example a page could exclude one of the three symbols if it only happens to need 4 annotations; a page that only needs three could get by with one symbol per mark; etc.

--

> I think the separation of citations and explanatory notes
> has been a real advance in layout of scholarly works.

Sure, but interjecting parenthetical text is brutish.

hhp

[William Berkson]

>Not really all that easy to skip’em though.

Yes it is, compared to having to go hunting at the back of the book to see whether or not you want to read the note.

Ideally, you keep the form of the citation short, so you do see the opening and closing parens and the number, clearly signaling a citation. I agree that it can help to use small caps too. Practically every scholarly journal I have seen for the past 40 years uses this format for citations, and most books. What can you suggest that's better?

The book I am finishing writing is littered with references to Bible and Talmud, and I'm doing all citations in small cap abbreviations, followed by chapter and verse, or Talmudic page. So these are in parens, the span of seven or eight characters. And there are no foot notes, end notes or side notes, though there are introductory notes and appendices.

So I'm not stuck on the reference-in-parens style, but I am totally convinced that if you have a lot of citations, they shouldn't be mixed with explanatory notes.

I think this is a matter of trying to make it easy and efficient for the reader to navigate, and both author and designer should be thinking about how to do that.

[hrant]

> compared to having to go hunting at the back of the book
> to see whether or not you want to read the note.

1) I thought we were talking about citations.
2) Exactly - footnotes!

> What can you suggest that’s better?

I thought it's been clearly stated:
- Numeric annotations for endnotes (long stuff).
- Symbolic annotations for footnotes (one-liners/citations).

And citations could be repeated/compiled at the end.

hhp

[William Berkson]

>I thought it was stated:
- Numeric annotations for endnotes.
- Symbolic annotations for footnotes.

Oh sorry, I didn't get it.

The advantage of the in line version is a. you have it and you're done, and it's easily skippable; b. it is space saving: if you have citations at the end, you can have a citation each line, so you eat up pages, or you have to reset with columns.

But there's a separate problem with foot notes, which is that they are usually very ugly and distracting, compared to side or end notes. I think they should be used very sparingly, if at all, and there shouldn't be more than two per page. Otherwise it gets *really* ugly.

I like all the little dingbats, but I just don't see the need for more than a few foot notes, ever.

I can see the use of the little dingbats if you have a list of members of an organization and want to distinguish various statuses, such as founder, member of the board, eastern division, etc, something like that might be useful.

[hrant]

> you have it and you’re done

Is it that big a deal to go down [an average of] half a page?

> it’s easily skippable

I don't agree. People read what's in front of them.

> foot notes ... are usually very ugly and distracting

To me parenthesized stuff is uglier.

And actually I personally have no aesthetic problem with footnotes; I think the only people who mind are Modernist book typographers, who don't want the "sanctity" of their gray page disrupted... The only trouble I have with them is when they're so long they go across a page!

> I just don’t see the need for more than a few foot notes, ever.

OK, but if you have more than three you're in trouble (and that's assuming you're a fan of daggers - which I myself am not - too crossy).

hhp

[John Hudson]

Aesthetically, I don't really like the inline citations, especially not when there are a lot of them on the page. Functionally, though, I do think they are the best approach, not least because they make it immediately apparent to the reader where a particular idea is coming from. In books with citations in footnotes or endnotes, I only occasionally bothered to look up citations; I am aware, with the inline citations, of a greater contextuality to my reading. That seems to me a functional editorial benefit, even if typographically I don't like the look of it much.

[John Hudson]

Bill: I can see the use of the little dingbats if you have a list of members of an organization and want to distinguish various statuses, such as founder, member of the board, eastern division, etc, something like that might be useful.

This reminds me of Maxim's brilliant potted history of Soviet typography in the shortlived ATypI journal Type (Vol.1 No.1 Spring 1997), in which the various apparatchiks are identified only by symbols, e.g. ‘I still remember the rebuff that Kurbatov and I were met with by comrades √ and ‡ (‡ is still alive)....’

[Riccardo Sartori]

But there’s a separate problem with foot notes, which is that they are usually very ugly and distracting, compared to side or end notes. I think they should be used very sparingly, if at all, and there shouldn’t be more than two per page. Otherwise it gets *really* ugly.

Have you ever saw something written by David Foster Wallace? ;-)

[Nick Job]

What about a bit of binary?

[William Berkson]

John, I agree with you that inline citations are a problem aesthetically. But to me superscript numbers or symbols are also even more distracting and disruptive. Because of their position to me they are like little alarm bells that tell you that you need to stop and look something up.

The cleanest method is where everything is in end notes with no superscript characters in the text. In this method, you have a running head above the end notes indicating which pages the notes relate to. Then before the note itself you have the page number and the phrase which has the associated citation or commentary.

Which approach is best I think depends on the nature of the text. For example, if you have a scholarly history that discusses various other historian's views, then in line citations I think would be appropriate. If you have a narrative history that goes for aesthetically pleasing story telling, then shoving all citations to the end, and keeping the text completely clean would be best.

Footnotes are the worst, because yes, Hrant, it is very disruptive on page after page to look down the page, and then have to go back and hunt down where you were in the text. And I don't think my aesthetic objection is a matter of 'modernism'; I'm not a modernist. It's just ugly.

[nina]

"The cleanest method is where everything is in end notes with no superscript characters in the text. In this method, you have a running head above the end notes indicating which pages the notes relate to. Then before the note itself you have the page number and the phrase which has the associated citation or commentary."

Super clean yes; but while you're reading the text, you have to guess which section might have a note in the back! Or are you supposed to first read the text, then read all the notes, and then find and re-read the sections of the text that have notes?
I've seen/read such systems a few times, and hated it every time. To me that's a pretty good example of prettiness/«clean-ness» that comes at the expense of usability. I think this can only work (if at all; I've personally never seen it work) in a very narrow range of text genres; for example in scientific texts it might actually be problematic editorially, because in the case of citations/sources, it doesn't make it immediately clear that a given section comes from a different source. That little «alarm bell» isn't just noise; it can also help mark things that aren't to be misread as self-contained truths. Kinda like that asterisk on shop signs that say «50% OFF ON EVERYTHING*».

[William Berkson]

Nina, as far as visual aesthetics, I think the only thing that is really problematic are foot notes. You can also mess up side notes visually, but if carefully done in an appropriate layout they can work.

The issue of in-line citations VS end notes with superior figures in the text VS end notes with no superior figures to me is mainly an issue of comfort and ease of use for the reader.

On the question of comfort and ease of use in the system with no superior figures, my experience is not the same as yours. I find it obvious when a quotation or factual claim calls for a citation, and if I want it, I'll go look at the end of a book. I'm grateful that there's nothing distracting me from the text and pushing me to look it up. As to explanatory notes, I'll just look at all the end notes before or after I read the text, and see if there is anything I find interesting.

My impression is that the cleanest method is becoming more and more popular, though it is more work in producing the book.

By the way, with electronic texts, you have a lot more options because of the possibility of hypertext links. That's an advantage of electronic texts, along with search-ability.

[hrant]

Sidenotes are less disruptive than endnotes?!

> I’m grateful that there’s nothing distracting me
> from the text and pushing me to look it up.

?
Parenthesized stuff right in the line doesn't do that?

> the cleanest method is becoming more and more popular

And we know what I for one think about popularity...
Fashion is one thing, function is another.

Hmmm, new term: fanction. When the two are in balance!

hhp

[William Berkson]

>Parenthesized stuff right in the line doesn’t do that?

No, it doesn't push you because the information is right there, and you don't have to go looking, wondering what it is. If you want actually to read the source cited, then you can go to the bibliography for info.

[John Hudson]

Sidenotes are less disruptive than endnotes?!

I would think so. Consider: our vision is aligned to horizontal movement, so glancing out to the margin and back in to the text on a horizontal plane, or close to a horizontal plane, is a faster process than looking down to the bottom of the page and back up again. Good marginal notes align to the text to which they refer, and hence can often be implemented without any inline indicators. So they may be both less disruptive to reading and less disruptive to the appearance of the text.

[hrant]

> it doesn’t push you because the information is right there

I have to concede that point.
But I worry that inline stuff is just too hard to ignore if you want to.

> glancing out to the margin and back .... is a faster process

Good point, I just worry that the temptation to look at the margin note* before its time is too great. As for the aesthetic argument, I think can go either way.

* Exactly because our eyes prefer the horizontal; plus it stands out in the empty margin.

--

Maybe my own reading habits are simply too inquisitive.

BTW, this is exactly the sort of thing that could be tested quite well empirically (unlike reading performance, which is a huge challenge).

hhp