I’ve blogged previously (and here privately) about the trouble I’ve been having with citing sources in online writing in terms of style: Whether to use print conventions or hypertext conventions. The benefit of using print conventions, i.e. APA style, is that there is a style guide, and a strict one at that, standard in the discipline I’m working/studying in. However, it doesn’t translate too well to online writing, hence a major disadvantage. Online writing should exploit hypertext for meaning-making and meaning-generating in allowing for links within and without the text itself. So, for example, a reference to (Bloggs, 2004) should link to the Bloggs’ work. Sentences can also be hyperlinked and this is commonly seen in online writing, traditionally indicated by a (blue) underline but nowadays more often just shown in a different colour (as in my leading sentence to this post).
The dilemma I’ve been having is how to go about hyperlinking to sources and yet still follow APA style, or at least the intent of APA style. I have a variety of different sources to cite in both primary (archived research data; my blog posts) and secondary (literature; websites; videos; blog posts) form and I’d rather cite-as-I-write rather than work it out later. Hence my dilemma!
- Should I include links in sentences? To source data? To secondary data? To external websites?
- Should I hyperlink in-text citations? To the end-text reference? To the original source? What about offline sources?
- Should I link to “anchors” within the text itself? When?
- Should I warn the reader/viewer that a link may take them to an external site? Should this be done by colour-coding, i.e. blue links for internal and purple for external? Orange for source (research) data? Or in some other way?
- Should I embed materials from external sites? How to caption them?
- When to hyperlink, and when not to? Just because it’s possible to hyperlink doesn’t mean that I should.
- Should I warn the reader/viewer that a link may ask them to download something, and if so, how big the file is?
These questions aren’t covered in the APA Style Guide, and I’ve asked the APA Twitter Team, but they haven’t been able to answer my questions either. It’s either new territory, or print conventions aren’t meant to apply to hypermedia situations. I think it’s more of the latter.
So where to look for guidance? in education (yes, the lowercase title is intentional) is a relatively new online, open-source, peer-reviewed journal on topics of connectivism in education. Considering the theoretical perspective and online nature of this journal, you’d expect the authors to exploit hypertext to their advantage. Unfortunately not. The articles, for the most part, conform to print APA Style standards and hyperlinks occur rarely (often only to external websites). Is it more than a little ironic that articles such as Digital Scholarship Considered: How New Technologies Could Transform Academic Work are written in a traditional style using print standards? I tend to think so.
It’s a similar situation for other prominent online journals in my field such as a href=”http://llt.msu.edu/default.html”>Language Learning & Technology (articles are in .pdf form); CALICO Journal (articles are in .html or .pdf with colour screenshots but no links); ReCALL Journal (published by Cambridge University Press in .pdf form); Computer Assisted Language Learning (published by Taylor & Francis in .pdf form); and CALL EJ Online (in .html form but no hyperlinks or hypertext – author submissions are to be made in .rtf form).
I’ve put the call out to my Twitter network to find other examples of (preferably education) journals that do use hypertext and have a style guide for authors: This will be useful indeed to inform development of my own style guide for my dissertation. In the meantime, I am going to work with Wikipedia’s Manual of Style, and adapt it to APA Style rather than footnote-endnote (or should that be APA Style adapted to Wikipedia style?).
As Wikipedia suggests, I will use “common sense in applying it”: It’s just that working out what “common sense” entails in terms of consistency is the tricky bit! For now, I will keep experimenting and playing with style, especially in my blog posts. It may be inconsistent process writing but hopefully my product writing will build on these experiences and be better for it.
