[Esip-preserve] Data Citations in the Age of Electronic Publication

[Bruce Barkstrom]

 For "recreational reading", I decided to peruse Adam Smith's
"The Wealth of Nations" to see if I could find some context
on his use of the famous term "invisible hand".  I thought this
referencing would be trivial and so I dug out my edition of the
printed book from Barnes and Noble.  Getting this copy was a
mistake - there's no index

I wanted to make some notes for comparison with works by other
authors.  With print works, I would usually reference a page number.
Not having an index is thus a serious impediment
to referencing the term in the original text.  I then tried the Internet
and found a free, downloadable version of the text as a pdf file.
Luckily, this version of the book's text included page numbers,
although I don't think there's a reference to which print edition
the copy came from.  The electronic copy is in pdf, so
I could use full text search.  Then, I could compare page numbers
in the Barnes and Noble edition with the ones in the on-line pdf.
The term "invisible hand" appears in the B&N edition on p. 300,
while the electronic file has it on p. 364.  The term is apparently
used just once.  As a mild added frustration, the pdf file doesn't
have an index either.  Could just be that Smith's original work
doesn't have an index, since it was published in 1776 and as
far as I can recall, adding an index to a book was not standard
until much later in the history of publishing.

If I extend the issue of specific references to material in Earth
science data, it creates some interesting scenarios.  Our usual
discussion of citations seems to treat these references as a pretty
"blunt" tool.  If I recall correctly, annotation schemes in the
humanities have a great many details for making the cited
material precise.  I'm not sure our discussion of citations have
the same level of precision.

If all we care about is giving credit to the "authors" or "editors",
the approach we've taken so far is probably adequate.  I think
it would let other researchers provide entries for bibliographies
or lists of references in published papers.  These would add to
professional credit for younger members of the academic
communities.

However, there are other cases where we need much more careful
references.  As a concrete example, consider trying to develop the
appropriate citation of the calibration gain used to derive the
reflected radiance in a channel of a satellite-borne instrument that was
going
to be used in determining whether a scene was cloudy.  Changing
the gain might change the pixels identified as "cloudy", so the
calibration is critical to determining the cloud cover or
the vegetation properties of the scene in some interesting part
of an image.  To complicate the context, assume that the measurement
was being made several years after launch and that the data production
source code that produced the data had undergone several revisions.
The same is true of the calibration coefficients.  How do we create
citations that will reference the proper pixels of interest in the data
file, along with the proper version of the source code and the proper
version of the calibration coefficients?  Note that neither the data
nor the calibration coefficients are necessarily in pdf files for which
it would be possible to do a "full-text" search - and it might very
well be that there would be so many references to particular numerical
values that a human reserarcher would be overwhelmed.  In addition, while
"provenance tracking" is certainly an element in this scenario,
it isn't necessarily the only part of the problem.  For "scholarly" work at
the
resolution of humanities work, we're also going to need to be
able to deal with references to subsets of data and context in
ways that allow us to find things -- even if the data format in
an archive rearranges the order of the data elements - or separates
the original content into new containers.

Any notion about how to deal with this kind of issue?

Bruce B.


On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 12:50 PM, Mark A. Parsons <parsonsm at nsidc.org>wrote:

> Sorry small change to the first one
>
> Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP). 2012.  Data
> Citation Guidelines for Data Providers and Archives. edited by M. A.
> Parsons, B. Barkstrom, R. R. Downs, R. Duerr, C. Tilmes  and the ESIP Data
> Preservation and Stewardship Committee. ESIP Commons. [DOI or ARK].
>
> -m.
>
> On 31 Aug 2012, at 10:47 AM, Mark A. Parsons wrote:
>
> > Hi Erin and Commons Committee
> >
> > The Preservation and Stewardship has agreed on how we think our two
> documents should be cited:
> >
> > Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP). 2012.  Data
> Citation Guidelines for Data Providers and Archives. edited by M. A.
> Parsons, B. Barkstrom, R. Downs, R. Duerr, C. Tilmes  and the ESIP Data
> Preservation and Stewardship Committee. ESIP Commons. [DOI or ARK].
> >
> > Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP). 2012.
> Interagency Data Stewardship Guidelines . edited by H. K. Ramapriyan, R.
> Duerr, and the ESIP Data Preservation and Stewardship Committee. 2012. ESIP
> Commons. [DOI or ARK].
> >
> > Please advise when identifiers have been assigned.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > -m.
>
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>
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