FWIW, in American law we have some experience with this because federal administrative agencies issue memorandum decisions with numbered paragraphs, which are cited accordingly. In the 1990s, the American Bar Association considered a proposal to extend this practice to judicial opinions. Our canonical citation format requires page citation, and the proposal was designed to make the HTML versions of opinions then-available on the open Web citable. Legal publishers effectively lobbied judges to oppose this proposal, and down it went. So, Stevan is right that this would be a good idea, but expect publishers to oppose any such effort for exactly the reason Jean-Claude identifies.
All the best,
MC
Michael W. Carroll
Associate Professor of Law
Villanova University School of Law
299 N. Spring Mill Road
Villanova, PA 19085
610-519-7088 (voice)
610-519-5672 (fax)
blog:
http://www.carrollogos.org/
Research papers:
http://ssrn.com/author=330326
http://law.bepress.com/villanovalwps/
See also www.creativecommons.org
>>> Jean-Claude Guédon <jean.claude.guedon_at_UMONTREAL.CA> 10/29/2006 10:51:51 AM >>>
I agree with Stevan that paragraph numbering is a very good idea. It has
an interesting consequence: if paragraph numbering becomes accepted
usage, one has to rely only on the version found in a repository. This
means that the repository version begins to acquire a status equal to
that of the published version, especially if the institution behind its
repository makes explicit statements regarding the quality of the
documents placed in its repository. This is a consequence Stevan may not
like, but it looks very good to me.
Jean-Claude Guédon
Le vendredi 27 octobre 2006 à 03:07 +0100, Stevan Harnad a écrit :
> In the online age, page/line-based quotation is obsolete (for current
> and forward-going text). Pages are and have always been arbitrary
> entities. A document's natural landmarks are sections, paragraphs and
> sentences. That is how quotations and passages should be cited, not by
> page numbers (though page numbers can be added in parens as a courtesy
> and curiosity, for continuity, for the time being, while pages -- and
> PDF -- scroll inexorably toward their natural demise).
>
> It goes without saying that all quotations, citations and references
> should be hyperlinked. I am sure that XML documents will be tagged for
> section number, paragraph number and sentence number, so that it will
> be natural not only to pinpoint the passage to which one wishes to
> refer, but to hyperlink directly to it.
>
> This answers, in passing, one faint concern about the self-archiving of
> authors' final refereed drafts instead of the published PDF: "How will
> I specify the location of passages I wish to single out or quote?" The
> answer is paragraph numbers (or, if you want to be even more precise,
> section numbers, paragraph numbers and sentence spans). They have the
> virtue of not only being autonomous and ascertainable from the document
> itself, but they are independent of arbitrary pagination and PDF. (It will
> also be useful for digitometric analyses.)
>
> (I introduced this rather trivial and obvious online solution in
> Psycoloquy
> http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
> in the early 90's,
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Theschat/0037.html
> -- though I'm sure I wasn't the first --
> and APA at last began recommending it in 2001:
> http://media.library.ku.edu.tr/refpgs/sociology/style_apa.htm )
>
> http://www.google.com/search?q=harnad+%22paragraph+number%22+&num=100&hl=en&lr=&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2005-09,GGGL:en&filter=0
>
> Stevan Harnad
--
Dr. Jean-Claude Guédon
Dept. of Comparative Literature
University of montreal
PO Box 6128, Downtown Branch
Montreal, QC H3C 3J7
Canada
Received on Mon Oct 30 2006 - 19:29:51 GMT