The following explains the approach to footnoting and citation followed in "Half of Asia, for a Thousand Years". Before you make much use of the "Main Guide" or of the footnotes, you should really read this, but the proper place to start in using this site is the start page.
This is the first footnoted work I've done, so I had to think through an approach. To begin with, note that I'm not a scholar myself, and the footnotes are not an attempt to make me look like one. It's just that I've relied so much on scholarly works, and have been so grateful to those that made it possible to verify their statements by means of footnotes, that I thought the appropriate thank-you was to do the same myself.
The first implication is that where in fact I have no justification for a statement, I say so in a footnote. Usually I then refer to whatever pointed me in the direction of the unproven statement, but don't be fooled: those references are not going to back up what I said, although they may lead you to a similar inference.
The second implication is that I tried to make the footnotes work as well as possible to point people to references. Since the biggest problems I faced in working on this chapter were 1) finding out about topics and 2) finding writings that were inadequately referenced, I've tried very hard 1) to mention topics of peripheral interest and what places I can point out to go if you're interested in them; 2) to make my references as full as possible.
This brings up two issues related to references. The first is series. About half of the books I mention belong to series. Very often, libraries catalogue them by series title only; very often, libraries don't note the series at all in cataloguing them. In general, when you find more than one italicised phrase in reference to a book, you should search on all of them in whatever library catalogue you're using. I did not observe any standard that libraries followed in deciding which series to treat as series and which not, so I didn't come up with any standard by which I could omit some series titles but not others. That said, I looked at some books only very early in my research, before reaching this decision. I was able to go back to most of these and note series titles anyway, but since I found an exception just a couple of days ago, I can't promise perfection.
The second issue regarding references has to do with transliteration of non-Roman alphabets. In general, I wrote what I saw. My own use of diacritics and the like has been the usual lackadaisically random approach - see for example the pages where I write "Rgveda" and then "Prakrit" (the "r" is the same in both cases, in the original Sanskrit, whose "r" is also the same). But I've tried, at least, to render authors' names, titles, and quotations (including quoted titles) as the books referred to had them.
For works referred to which are in non-Roman scripts, I've followed a double standard. If the work is referred to as the source of a Roman-script translation, I use whatever transliteration of the original title is present in the translation. (There are a few books about Siberia which unaccountably omit the names of their sources; in those cases, I used the first transliteration I was able to find.) But if the work is referred to in its own right, with a more plausible expectation that someone might actually look it up, I use, with extreme reluctance, whatever transliterations are to be found in Worldcat. Please note that Worldcat's usual rule is that nothing may be transliterated the way anyone else would do it, and that it imposes consistency only in cases which support that rule.* But the few books in question are rare enough (for the most part) that finding out which libraries have them is most of the battle. Just be prepared to have to do a lot of guessing as to different transliterations when dealing with any catalogue other than Worldcat.
Works referenced in "footnote 1" have *s before the reference if I was unable to meet my own standards for verifying the reference. These include the works in non-Roman scripts, and a few which, for whatever reason, I was unable to see after deciding to include them in the references. Note that * is not used in a similar way in the footnotes proper (where, in fact, it is used to point to footnote 1!). Offhand, the only Roman-script works I can think of in the footnotes proper that I didn't write adequate references for are Inagaki's in note 77, #1, and two of the books by Charles Lyall mentioned in note 88. The only work in the footnotes proper that's in non-Roman script is Chunakova's, mentioned in footnote 91a.
Oh, that reminds me: notes that are there only because the chapter's standing alone are given letters, as in 91a. Those notes will be replaced with forward or backward references when the book's closer to finished form.
One last thing about references. I worked hard for correctness, and worked hard for completeness, in the sense of including all the information I had decided was essential. I did not work hard for consistency. I'm perfectly well aware that my citation style is often bizarre; some aspects of that are whim or fatigue, while others reflect genuine irritation at standard citation style. For example, I think it's a pain when I read a heavily footnoted or, worse, endnoted book, only to find, when finally checking the bibliography, that the notes actually all referred to trivial secondary sources such as tourist guidebooks. So where I refer to items in the bibliography at the end, in the footnotes proper, I try to include enough of the title to show whether I'm pointing to something specialised or to a second-grade primer. On the other hand, when it comes to including the cities of publication of periodicals, I simply felt too tired to find those for most of the periodicals mentioned, or even to remove them for the few where I already knew.
Um. This is a haphazard enough approach that I could have ended up making things as bad as the worst of the herein-named books do. I hope not, though. Good luck with these.
Joe Bernstein
* - Worldcat's sins? Well, note that Ahmad Tafazzoli and B. A. Litvinsky frequently publish, under those names, in Roman script; this puts Worldcat in the comical position of having to list Litvinsky's books as being by Litvinski, if it remembers to. Now, as it happens, Litvinski is the standard transliteration from the Russian, so one could defend this as simply showing consistency. But if this were truly so, Sajjadi's book (all of these examples come from the "Main Guide") would not have two utterly different spellings, one complete with extraneous nonsense punctuation, for its two editions. Most of the stupid mistakes library catalogues make which I mention in the notes are present in Worldcat, so I am not feeling much charity towards it; for about half the books I actually needed to look up in it, success was delayed, usually by a year or more, by these very problems.
Half of Asia, for a Thousand Years - Start Page
Main Guide - Footnotes - Linking Text - About the Notes
Main Guide - Unicode - Footnotes - Unicode - Linking Text - Unicode - About the Notes - Unicode
URL: <http://turing.postilion.org/these-survive/fishtory/chapter2/about.html>.
Copyright Joe Bernstein <joe@sfbooks.com>, 2001. Electronic transfer permitted.
Written in March, 2001, and not significantly changed since; webbed August 31,2001. Please do not expect updates; see the start page for more information about why not.