Dr. Lee Giles: Contextual Citations

 

Hello Dr. Giles,

I’ve developed an app for creating contextual citations for the web and, given your work with CiteSeer, I’m interested in gauging whether there would be interest within academia for my project.

What are Contextual Citations?

Contextual citations, as I’ve implemented them, allow authors to demonstrate the context of their citations by expanding the 500 characters of the context surrounding a quote. (See Demo below)

Writers can create contextual citations by marking up their citations using a “cite” attribute and calling a web service that looks up their citation and extracts the surrounding context into a JSON file.

Reader’s browsers then retrieve the surrounding JSON data and display it when the user clicks on the blue arrows above and below a quote, or for shorter inline quotes, clicking on a styled link to view a popup.

 

Demo: Two examples of contextual citations:

1. Blockquote: longer quotes

The Jefferson Memorial quotes Thomas Jefferson’s autobiography:

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.

But if you click the blue down arrow and read the next few lines, you can quickly see that Jefferson’s original meaning was distorted by the removal of the quote’s context.

2. Inline quotation: shorter quotes

But catching cherry-picked citations isn’t the only advantage of being able to preview the surrounding context. Often the context provides the reader with a fuller understanding of the meaning. Take the following quote about “Well-behaved Women ..”.

Harvard Professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich‘s recently popularized quip that “Well-behaved women seldom make history” appears on T-shirts, but do you know the original context? (click the above link)

Additional Examples:

To personalize things, I decided to cite one of your publications on the subject of RefSeer:

RefSeer:

Here’s is an example of a citation describing RefSeer:

a citation recommendation system which automatically suggests can-didate citations based on input queries. RefSeer has appli-cations for both researchers and reviewers. While authoring a paper, researchers can use our citation recommendation system to find prior works related to the problem they seek to investigate. In turn, reviewers can use RefSeer to check whether a paper cites all relevant papers

When I published this blog post, it looked up the PDF for your publication and extracted the 500 characters of surrounding text into a JSON file that my web service saved to a CDN.

I have also created a WordPress demo that you can use to test-drive what a web application that implements contextual citation is like in real practice.

 

(more: Test-drive WordPress Demo with video)

How Contextual Citations Work:

• When an author publish a citation (in Html), they add a “cite” attribute to their citation tag: <blockquote cite=”cited-url”>quote</blockquote>
• The author or CMS system makes a call to the api.citeit.net web service when the publication takes place.
• The web service receives the URL of the citing publication and retrieves a copy, looking for any blockquote or q tags that contain a cite attribute with a valid URL.
• The web service retrieves each cited document and validates whether the quote matches the source.
• If the quote matches, it extracts the 500 characters of the surrounding context and saves it to a JSON file, which is then saved to a CDN or public webserver.
• The reader’s browser uses javascript to look up this JSON file when browsing the citing document.
• If the reader clicks on the arrows or text link, the javascript renders the JSON file that it got from the web service and displays it to the user in a div above the quote or in a popup.

(more: Developer Information with video)

Questions for Dr. Giles:

 

• Do you think a free open-source contextual citation system would be useful to academics?
• Many academic papers are published in PDF. Do you think a contextual citation system needs to be able to display an expanding/popup user interface from within PDF to be useful, or would the ability to cite PDFs from within Html be enough?
• How significant of a barrier do you think access restrictions are to the implementation of contextual citations in academia?
• Do you have any colleagues who might be interested in learning more about CiteIt.net’s Contextual Citation?

 

 

Citing YouTube transcripts:

Although I haven’t heard of academic publications citing video transcripts, I have also been working on citation of audio and video. 

As an example, consider the following quote from James Burke‘s “Connections” series about a “crafty way” the Library of Alexandria assembled their collection:

About me:

I was born in Winnipeg Manitoba but grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  I majored in history at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.  I took some electives in computer science while I was there.  After I graduated in 2001, I got a job as a computer programmer and I’ve worked as a programmer ever since. 

The CiteIt.net app arose out of an interest in writing a review of hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson that was more in the spirit for his original vision for hypertext.  I’ve been working on this Citation project since 2015 as a hobby.

Long-term Goals:

If everything works according to plan, I’d like to work on this full-time for an organization like the Internet Archive under a grant from an organization like the Knight Foundation.  I’d like CiteIt.net to expand to include text, audio, and video and my goal is to maximize the good that I create and inspire rather than the amount of money that I capture.

If you have any suggestions for how I should proceed, sent me an email.