citation | Thought splinters

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().

Advantages of URL shortener

Tue, 23 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Citing and visiting web addresses with long URLs is sometimes complicated. Long URLs are particularly a hardness when there are no clickable links but only long strings printed on paper. This article suggests URL shortener to avoid the hurdle mentioned above.

What is a URL Shortener?¹

At first, we need to clarify what an “URL” is. “URL” stands for “Uniform Resource Locator,” and they’re a way of identifying the location of a file on the internet.

A URL is not the same as a domain name! Sometimes these both terms are confused and used interchangeably. But a domain name is just one part of a URL. The image below shows the difference:

Figure 1: Parts of an Uniform Resource Locator (URL)²

Use URL shortener for your references

Depending on the Content Management System (CMS) the website is using you can get very long URLs. There are three types of long URLs:

Long pretty URLs: These URLs consist of understandable text strings. Example: https://www.dbfk.de/media/docs/expertengruppen/pflegemanagement/DBfK-Handreichung-BAG-Pflegemanagement-Anwerbung-auslaendischer-Mitarbeiter_innen.pdf
Long ugly URLs: These URLs include randomly mixed characters, generated automatically by the CMS. Example: https://www.art.com/gallery/id--c23945/decorative-art-prints.htm?ui=6731D67F76A44083AD1B8F110C4FE301.
Long mixed URLs: These URLs contain understandable parts, but these sequences are directed to the CMS and not to humans. Examples are strings for the search engine: https://www.sfgate.com/search/?action=search&firstRequest=1&searchindex=solr&query=%22earthquake+san+francisco%22.

The solution for all these kinds of long URLs is the usage of URL shortener. There is a great variety of URL shortener available. But instead to use the automatic generated short URL (e.g., something like bit.ly/2GIYPa3) use the possibility to edit the URL with an appropriate and memorable word. Although these strings are often longer than the automatically generated short URL, they are much easier to type. Besides, you or other users can even memorize them (e.g., https://bit.ly/url-shortener).

As other users of the service also take memorizable short URLs, sometimes there may be a clash of URLs. If this happens, then you are not allowed to generate this specific URL. To prevent colliding URLs, I use a short prefix referring to me as the author or to the subject/project of the URL (e.g., https://bit.ly/pb-url-shortener).

Summary

You might be thinking that shortening your URL is an extra step, but URL shorteners are very beneficial:

Short URLs are more comfortable to share
Short URLs are essential if there is limited space (e.g., Twitter)
Short URLs are more visually appealing
Short URLs are memorized easier
Short URLs are more straightforward to type when there is only a paper reference
Short URL services can provide additional information such as the number of clicks
Short URLs can be adjusted if the original URL changes, so that users still have the correct links
Short URLs services allow you sometimes to create your brand and categories for your URLs. If they do not provide this service, you can use prefixes to get some rudimentary management for your URLs
Short URLs prevent line breakings (e.g., in emails) so that the user does not have to cut and paste to put the link together

But there is also a disadvantage of URL shortener:² They are often used by spammers to hide the URL destination. That way, unsuspecting people are more likely to click on them.

Wakelet

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

I took the next two paragraphs from Oberlo and modified them slightly. ↩︎
I took the next two sentences from Oberlo. ↩︎

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. ↩︎

citation | Thought splinters

Announcing the R package coinsR

Use cases of coinsR and its limitations

Where to find coinsR and how to install it?

Advantages of URL shortener

What is a URL Shortener?1

Figure 1: Parts of an Uniform Resource Locator (URL)2

Use URL shortener for your references

Summary

Wakelet

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?

What is a URL Shortener?¹

Figure 1: Parts of an Uniform Resource Locator (URL)²