Announcing the R package coinsR

Fri, 02 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Update 2021-05-21: Because of some breaking changes in the Hugo site structure and management in the last three years, coinsR works at the moment only with individual pages.

This blog entry announces the R program coinsR to produce bibliographic metadata automatically for websites within the Hugo framework. The dominant use case at the moment is with the blogdown package.

In a previous blog entry I wrote about the advantages of providing bibliographic metadata for your web pages producing COinS. COinS is the abbreviation of Context Objects in Spans. It refers to a microformat standard to embed bibliographic metadata as HTML.

A COinS string includes HTML code for all the information necessary to cite a publication correctly. It works for every type of writing (books, papers, web pages). COinS embedded in your HTML pages help your blog readers or website visitors to cite your posts and pages correctly.

I wrote also a detailed tuorial how to produce COinS with the help of the free bibliographical research tool Zotero. But this is a quite complicated procedure with several steps. Besides, it works only for every page individually and not automatically for all blog entries of your website.

To produce COinS for every web page quickly was my motivation to write the R package coinsR.

Use cases of `coinsR` and its limitations

The package requires:

Hugo with the R package blogdown
Config file in the TOML format (config.toml)
Blog entries with YAML frontmatter

I plan for a future version to loosen the last two limitations and allow config.yaml and TOML frontmatter (but not for .json).

Update 2021-05-21: This plan is still relevant: I would like to loosen some restrictions and improve the user interface.

You can call coinsR via an RStudio Addin for every page individually. But you can also produce COinS automatically for all files under a specific directory.

Where to find `coinsR` and how to install it?

You can download the package from Github with

remotes::install_github('petzi53/coinsR', build_vignettes = TRUE)

I am trying to prepare coinsR as an R package distributed via the CRAN repository. But as I am still not very experienced in R programming, I am not sure if I will succeed.

You will find a detailed description in the help file and the vignette description of how to invoke the two functions coins_this() and coins_all().

Archiving Quoted Web Resources

Mon, 22 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Quoting web resources is a hassle for several reasons:

Web pages are not available anymore.
Web pages have moved to another URL.
Web pages change their content so that the cited reference is not correct anymore.

Humanities, where detailed content analysis of websites is a popular research method. Referring to exact quotes is a question of reproducibility and therefore crucial in science generally. This article presents some strategies and tools to bypass the challenges mentioned above.

Quote websites with the Wayback Machine

With WebCite, there used to be a web service to circumvent link rot and changed the content. WebCite allowed to archive online resources and returned an URL where these filed pages could be accessed. Besides that this service was often down and therefore notoriously unreliable, as of July 14, 2019, it does not accept any new archive requests anymore.

Figure 1: Start page of the WebCite service, proclaiming that new archiving request are currently not feasible anymore.

Luckily with Wayback Machine¹, operated by the Internet Archive, there is recently a new and reliable web service available. Although there is a sophisticated how-to use of this service in the Wikipedia context, I have prepared my own How-to use Wayback Machine for the general public.

Visit my slides on How-to use Wayback Machine for the general public.

Figure 2: Start page of the Wayback Machine, a service by the Internet Archive

How to cite archived resources?

Internet Archive asked the Modern Language Association (MLA) how to cite resources archived with the Wayback Machine. MLA Style is a prevalent system for documenting sources in scholarly writing.

MLA answered

that there is no established format for resources like the Wayback Machine, but it’s best to err on the side of more information. You should cite the webpage as you would normally, and then give the Wayback Machine information.

MLA also provided an example:

McDonald, R. C. “Basic Canary Care.” Robirda Online. 12 Sept. 2004. 18 Dec. 2006 $$<http://www.robirda.com/cancare.html>$$. Internet Archive. $$ http://web.archive.org/web/20041009202820/http://www.robirda.com/cancare.html$$.

Note there are several additions to a standard bibliography:

Two dates: The first is the date of the archive, then comes the date when the page is retrieved.
Two URLs: The first is the original URL (not available anymore), then comes the archived URL from the Internet Archive.
Web service: Between the two URLs comes the ‘second’ author, the name of the internet service which archived the resource and generated its URL.

According to MLA, both URLs shouldn’t be underlined in the bibliography.

Let’s try another example. The archiving service Peeep.Us is not available anymore. The Wayback Machine gives us as archived URL https://web.archive.org/web/20180813205348/http://peeep.us:80/. If we are are going to compose this bibliography in the usual way, we would get:

Nikolaev, Cyril. “Peeep.Us.” Save Snapshot of a Web Page Forever!, 13 Aug. 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20180813205348/http://peeep.us:80/.

Using a name for web sites may questionable, but I use it whenever there is a reasonable possibility (e.g., from the Copyright or from the name of the institution, which produces the web site).

Now we have to add the retrieval date, the original URL and the name of the archiving service:

Nikolaev, Cyril. “Peeep.Us.” Save Snapshot of a Web Page Forever!, 13 Aug. 2018, 22 Jul. 2019 $$<http://peeep.us>$$. Internet Archive. $$<https://web.archive.org/web/20180813205348/http://peeep.us:80/>$$.

Wakelet

In addition to the following Wakelet, there is also a community edition on my Wakelet homepage where you can add relevant links.

To access this page you must be registered by archive.org. ↩︎

scientific writing | Thought splinters

Announcing the R package coinsR

Use cases of coinsR and its limitations

Where to find coinsR and how to install it?

Archiving Quoted Web Resources

Quote websites with the Wayback Machine

How to cite archived resources?

Wakelet

Use cases of `coinsR` and its limitations

Where to find `coinsR` and how to install it?