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I agree with Tim that the current practice for citation of websites hides the labour of the contributors, and makes it difficult for the growing number of people for whom this is a major source of employment and intellectual development (especially early in their careers) to show this work on their CVs. Having worked on a number of projects like the ones Tim mentions I am still not satisfied with the ways I have to represent this work in my portfolio. Similarly there are also smaller scale projects, which may only involve a few people, that are primarily digital (whether a website, building a tool, producing a database) that we don't have citations practices that expose the work that people have done. This doesn't raise the same problem about long lists of names, but does relate to other kinds of issues around citation of digital work. It would also be advantageous to make a claim to treat the kind of work that goes into building a website as analogous to more traditional kinds of publications. In many cases the types of research and analysis that are involved are very similar. By hiding the authorship elements we are undervaluing the intellectual contribution of the participants and the overall value to the discipline of these new kinds of work. In 'big data' driven sciences where teams of hundreds are involved, 40 would be considered a small number of authors, so there are citation practices in the sciences that we could potentially use to deal with the problem that Tim raises. Seth Denbo >>I have been involved in a series of relatively large scale digitisation projects over the last ten years, and I wanted to ask the advice of this list and through it the wider historical community, about how best to cite projects like The Old Bailey Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org<http://www.oldbaileyonline.org>< http://www.oldbaileyonline.org>) and London Lives (www.Londonlives.org<http://www.Londonlives.org>< http://www.Londonlives.org>). Both sites currently provide detailed citation guides, and automatically generated forms of citation for each web page that satisfy the main purpose of a citation - to be able to find the material again. But it has been represented to me that this form of citation effectively hides the creative contribution of the individual members of the teams of people who created these resources. As large scale projects become more common in the humanities, and as the number of people building careers in them grows, it seemed important to interrogate how we are currently representing the contributions made by programmers, and project managers, etc. An alternative would be to ask that the websites be cited as 'authored' by all of the people involved (some forty individuals in the case of the Old Bailey and London Lives). This would create a more science-like form of authorship and could include an indication of their role in the project. A form of citation of this sort, would have the advantage of allowing individuals to cite the project as a 'publication' on their CVs, and to claim an equivalence between this kind of work, and the single authored format of most published history. This could, in turn, help to make the academy a bit more commodious, and to give proper credit for the creative contributions made by individuals to large team projects. At the same time, no-one wants to lard their footnotes with forty names (even once, assuming the citation was radically truncated after its first use). This would also have implications for how we acknowledge the roles of research assistants and PhD students in a more traditional context. Any advice or comment, very much welcome. I am particularly anxious to canvas the opinions of people who have experience of working in large team projects.<<
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