Preface: Rationale for this Provisional Proposal

While writing my book, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), I became aware of limitations in the current stylesheets or guidelines for citing Web resources. The best-known style guides are not intended for scholars who address "new media"—especially online new media—as their primary object of study (or one of their objects of study) rather than merely as a secondary resource. Stylesheets for print-based scholarship tend for reasons of economy to treat online materials as essentially analogous to print materials, though supplemented with a few additional bibliographic descriptors (e.g., date of access).

However, scholars who study the new media as a topic in itself require a bibliographical vocabulary that more fully accommodates the ways in which online materials are not like print works. For example, the study of a digital work might require citing different versions of a work, different dates of access, or the different levels of a site (main pages versus subpages or alternate sites).

For the purposes of my book, therefore, I concocted a style that primarily follows the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (ed. Joseph Gibaldi, 6th ed.) but also includes elements of the APA (American Psychological Association) style. However, I extended these guidelines because the nature of my historical and contextual study of Web sites required more detail about the date of site creation, revision, and access; the identity of site creators, editors, maintainers, and sponsors; the site title (which is not necessarily explicit on a page); the relative position of pages within a site; and so on. The result is what might be called, for the present, simply "Liu style."

I offer this idiosyncratic style, of course, only as a provisional supplement to the known stylesheets. Ideally, my suggestions will need to be tested (and themselves revised) in collaboration not just with the MLA, APA, and other such organizations but with such newer organizations as the ELO (Electronic Literature Organization) dedicated to the new media. In addition, all these style-setting organizations would ideally collaborate with the library (information science) community, the Text Encoding Initiative (and other text-encoding standards bodies), and the software industry to coordinate citation style with the "metadata" needed for today's automated management of information. (Ideally, a citation would be the reduced version of standardized metadata decriptors that facilitate the indexing, searching, sampling, sharing, storage, and preservation of digital resources).

The following are the particulars of "Liu style" in its present state. These particulars are based on instructions I set down for myself and my copy editor during the production stage of the Laws of Cool book. They do not comprise a complete style guide, but are supplementary to the known style guides. I have left my suggestions in personal voice (these are the explanations I sent to my copy editor about my book) in order to emphasize their provisional nature.

I offer my suggestions to others wrestling with new media merely as starting points for further improvement.

Headnote for a Bibliography/Works Cited List

I preface the Works Cited list in my book with the following headnote. Any work of scholarship that substantially utilizes new media could usefully include such a headnote designed to orient the reader to the current circumstances of online media, especially in regard to recovering from dead links.

Title of Web Site

The titles of Web sites in my book are italicized, but titles of secondary pages on a site are usually in quotes (except when they in turn are gateway pages to tertiary pages that I cite). I do not italicize organization names (e.g., Center for Democracy and Technology) even when the home page for the organization has no other name, preferring instead to add "Home page" after the name of the organization. Sometimes it is necessary to add a note about later or earlier names/titles of a site, especially when an earlier or later version is better known.

On some Web sites, there is a disagreement between the title declared in the source-code HTML <title> tag (the "technical title," as it might be called, which shows up in a browser's title bar) and an informal, but more obvious, title appearing on the visible page itself in formatting that approximates the look of titles in print works (e.g., large font, centered at the top of the page). In the case of such conflicts, I cite the more obvious"visible" rather than technical title. Where there is neither a technical or visible title, I assign a common-sense title to the page if possible (in preference to naming it "untitled").

In the case of multiple citations referring to various parts of a site, I divide the bibliographical entry into two levels—differentiating between the primary (home page) level and a generic "secondary" level. "Secondary" means anything at a level beneath the root page in a hierarchy or (in the case of distributed sites) in a separate hierarchy or server. (I do not attempt to map in finer detail the internal structure of a site.)

Author or Editor of Web Site

Where it is clear that there is an individual or corporate "author" of a Web site analogous to a print author (i.e., someone who writes most or all of the material on the site or writes something like a book or essay), I cite the author's or name before the site title. (e.g., Bacon, David. "Organizing Silicon Valley's High Tech Workers"; or, Progress & Freedom Foundation, "Mission"). Otherwise, I usually cite the Web site title first, followed by the name of the site maintainer or originator. In some cases, it is appropriate to refer to the maintainer as "Ed." (editor). At other times, it is more appropriate to say "created by" (or to use some other descriptor). Sometimes there is no adequate description for the role of the person at all (for example, for someone who is simultaneously creator, programmer, designer, editor, etc.), and I do not prefix the name with a role.

There are two exceptions to the above conventions. The Web sites that I discuss by title in my Chapters 5 and 6 are alphabetized in my Works Cited by their titles (i.e., titles precede names even when the names are of author-like persons). This is because the titles in those chapters are in many cases more important and better known than the authors, and because the authors sometimes change or are collective. Also, reference by title is more useful to the readers of those chapters, which rarely discuss the authors as such.

The other exception is in the case of my own Web sites, which are listed in the Works Cited as "Liu, Alan, ed. [Title of site]" rather than title first followed by "Ed. Alan Liu." It seemed more useful to the reader to gather my print and Web works together in the works cited in the same location.

Relation Between the Print and Online Versions of a Work

When citing an online source that originally came from a print source, I follow the usual convention of citing first the print information and then the online information and retrieval date. (I supply as much information about the print resource as I can, but sometimes it is not possible to do more than note the date if the print resource was a fugitive or difficult to get work.) However, there are some entries in which I clarify that I am citing the print and online versions separately because of substantive differences.

Date of Online Publication

Where known, the date is included as found on the site, whether it is dd/mm/yy, mm/yy, or just year. Depending on the nature of the site, I sometimes add detail of the sort, "created on" or "updated on."

Sponsoring Site or Institution

Where known and appropriate (as recommended by MLA), I add the name of the sponsoring or underlying Web site or institution. I do not do so, however, for personal home pages (except where there is a clear professional affiliation) or pages in directories of the sort "http://www.organization.edu/~person_name" (where the tilde indicates a personal directory). For some sites, I add a note to indicate that the ownership of the site changed since I studied it (e.g., "Netscape Communications, Inc., later part of AOL-Time Warner, Inc.")

Date of Retrieval

Because much of my argument about Web sites is historical (e.g., the nature of a site in 1996 as opposed to 2002), I expand the information about date of retrieval as necessary. Sometimes I ascribe just a simple date—e.g., "Retrieved on 3 May 2002." Sometimes the date information takes the following form: "Retrieved on various dates, 1996-2001; last retrieved on 3 May 2002." Where sites are currently dead, I verify the historical existence of the sites on the access dates I cite by using the Internet Archive (to which the headnote of my Works Cited refers).