Discussion: Tiddler titles for sources

[Si]

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 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.

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.

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!

[springer]

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

[TiddlyTweeter]

Interesting discussion.

Tiddler titles could be a problem, or not, depending on how you organise stuff. Take the case of William Empsom's SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY. There is the original 1930 edition, the 1947 2nd edition, the 1953 revised 2nd edition. There was also an American 1947 edition.

I am not fully sure this a TW issue, so much as a WHAT IS MY CITATION scheme? issue :-)

Just for fun it is worth noting that I could happily cite, via TW title "{{EMP-30}} differs from {{EMP-47}} "...

Isn't this just about getting to a convention and sticking to it? :-)

Happy scholar thoughts!

TT

Do you prefer to use 'official' names or to come up with your own?You

[Charlie Veniot]

On Monday, June 28, 2021 at 1:51:05 PM UTC-3 Si wrote:

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.

If you do want something to make it easy to find titles while creating links, you might find the Edit-CompText plugin really helpful.

 

[Si Si]

@Springer

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. ;)   

I didn't actually think of that, definitely an advantage of using full names.

I've recently gravitated toward approaching the title field with author-date brevity, as is used in interlinear citation: Beauvoir 1962 

This definitely has advantages in terms of brevity, but my intuition is that I would find only including the author's name more difficult to remember.

 *but* I have the freedom to custom-abbreviate titles that are inconveniently long. 

I think I am leaning towards taking a similar approach, but with the main titles rather than captions. Something like Ethics of Ambiguity is short and easy to remember, but something like Genome-wide CRISPR–Cas9 screening reveals ubiquitous T cell cancer targeting... is going to be much easier to manipulate in your mind if you come up with a new label for it.

@TiddlyTweater

I am not fully sure this a TW issue, so much as a WHAT IS MY CITATION scheme? issue :-)  

Not quite. It's more about labels than citations. I'm interested in what is a good way to label sources so that I can most easily manipulate them in my thinking. Again this all goes back to "Idea APIs".

@Charlie

If you do want something to make it easy to find titles while creating links, you might find the Edit-CompText plugin really helpful.  

Thanks, I already use this plugin!

I would say that the titles for me are less about being easy to find with TW tools, and more about making sources easy to think about and pull out of my brain, if that makes any sense. Hence why I'm questioning whether using the 'official' name is necessarily always the best option.

I don't know for sure, but I just have a suspicion that shorter names make sources easier to think about as concepts/ideas. In conversation people often shorten the names of things when discussing them (e.g. "Empire" and "Jedi" for Star Wars 2 + 3) and obviously this just saves time, but I think there may be cognitive benefits of compressing names in this way when discussing sources.

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