Si, Field name usage for bibliographic data is also a "live" problem for me.
I've recently gravitated toward approaching the title field with author-date brevity, as is used in interlinear citation: *Beauvoir 1962* (or *Beauvoir 1962b* in the rare case of multiple sources published from same year). This pattern is easy to type, not terribly difficult to remember, and generally steers clear of confusion for my purposes. On the other hand, if you like using the off-the-shelf sidebar search function (as I do, especially if I publish for students), that may give you a reason to stick with a longer concatenation: if the title field holds *Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity (1962)* you can always easily find it even if you only remember that the source has "ambiguity" in it. ;) Either way, then I end up modifying various templates (including the sidebar tabs) to show the caption field. Usually this will hold a version of the author surname plus full primary title (omitting subtitle), *but* I have the freedom to custom-abbreviate titles that are inconveniently long. It's convenient to build filters that fetch one field value *if* it exists, and to pull from a default field if not.) It's awkward that the fieldname "title" is not really workable for the full title of the bibliographic source, since I like to use intuitive field names. Using fieldnames like bibtex-title bibtex-year (etc) works ok when field names are all hidden under the hood and handled through automated imports and forms, etc. But they're a nuisance to type repeatedly, and (worse for my purposes) they are bulky, and this becomes a problem in dynamic tables (which auto-sizes columns so that the bibtex-year column is twice as wide as the data needs). I actually wonder whether there already is -- or could be -- something like an efficient sub-forum for people who are using TiddlyWiki in an extensive way for bibliographic purposes. It's not always easy to go searching through the google groups for relevant past posts, and I know there have been a ton of them. There's great benefit to converging on conventions together, since that way plugins, specialized ViewTemplates, macros (etc.) can be shared easily. -Springer On Monday, June 28, 2021 at 12:51:05 PM UTC-4 Si wrote: > Hi all, > > I've been rethinking how I should name tiddlers that represent sources, > and I'm interested in hearing the thoughts of other TiddlyWiki users. > > By sources I mean books, articles, movies etc. The crucial point here is > that I am talking about things that have an 'official' name. > > Currently I use the 'official' title of the source, plus any extra > information required to make it unique. For example: > > Books: The Fellowship of the Ring - J.R.R. Tolkien > Movies: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) > Articles: The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert > Performance (1993) > > In addition to this I might use a caption which displays a truncated > version of the title when I cite the source in another tiddler, for example > Ericsson-1993 or DeliberatePractice1993. > > I was browsing Soren's Zettelkasten > <https://zettelkasten.sorenbjornstad.com/> and I noticed that he does > things the opposite way around. He gives (usually) short CamelCase titles > and relies on the caption field for the official name. > > I have been thinking about this and two possible advantages occur to me: > > - Shorter titles are quicker to type when linking from other tiddlers. > - More importantly, perhaps they are easier to remember, or 'lock > onto'? For example I will probably more easily be able to pull > "DeliberatePractice1993" from my brain than I would "The Role of > Deliberate > Practice..." This relates to titles functioning like APIs > <https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_note_titles_are_like_APIs>. > > Possible disadvantages: > > - They are likely harder to generate automatically from source > metadata. This may not be a disadvantage, as perhaps there is a benefit to > thinking up titles yourself. > - Even when coming up with titles yourself, it may be tricky to figure > out a succinct way to represent sources with very long and complex titles, > for example these scientific papers > > <https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/five-most-popular-scientific-papers-of-january-twenty-twenty-altmetrics> > . > > Anyway this is a fairly open ended post, but I'm wondering how people > approach naming sources in TiddlyWiki? > How do you name source tiddlers, and why? > Do you prefer to use 'official' names or to come up with your own? > > Please be free to comment with any thoughts you have relating this topic, > no matter how divergent! > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tiddlywiki+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/4c7e69b8-6984-4c4b-bd41-62cfb954fd83n%40googlegroups.com.
