ThesaHelp: help with quotations

Summary

Quotations are the heart of Thesa. They capture an idea from an article or book that is new or interesting. Topics provide access to related ideas. Bibliographic references provide a source for reading the quotation in context, and further exploration of the author's ideas.

If copyright clearance is required, a quotation skeleton replaces the quotation. See (ThesaHelp: help with quotation skeletons) for further discussion.

A quotation has a descriptive label, a bibliographic reference, and links to one or more topics of related quotations. A quotation includes a few sentences upto a paragraph or two. Quotations are from books, published articles, and technical reports. Notes may be taken from talks, trade journals, and notebooks.

Quotations are typed instead of copy/paste. This helps ensure that they standalone and have value, but may lead to transcription errors. Ellipsis and annotation are freely used. See below for conventions.

Each quotation has a descriptive label, usually one or two lines of text. The label is a headnote that captures the important idea of the quotation. The reader uses the label to decide whether or not a quotation may be relevant.

Eight words are enough to identify most quotations in a search engine. Two word HTML links invoke a phrase search in Google. There is a link for the first eight words, the first eight words after page breaks, and the last eight words.

Thesa uses the following conventions:

• Quotations elide text with "..." and provide clarifications with brackets (e.g., '[Andrew File System]').

• Internal references are abbreviated within brackets (e.g., [author, title, date]).

• If a quote starts with a reference, the quotation is from that author.

• All quotations were typed by hand. Quotations are spell-checked. Misspellings in the original are likely to be lost. Variant spellings are usually retained. Missing words and other transcription errors are usually caught when labeling the quote.

• Capitalization, notations, and bold/italic phrases are preserved. If a quote starts midsentence, the first letter is lower-case. If the quote ends midsentence, there is no '.'.

• Italics are usually dropped from one-letter words (e.g., 'x' for a math unknown).

• Accents are dropt from non-English words and names. They will eventually be restored.

• Bullets are indicated by a '@' character.

• Math expressions are spelled out as necessary (e.g.., '.alpha.'). Subscripts are indicated with '_', superscripts with '^'.

• Page breaks are indicated by a page reference between brackets (e.g., '... [p. 345] It appears'). A page break midsentence is delayed to the first period or comma.

• A line break is indicated by '//'. Paragraph breaks are usually ignored.

• Font styles other than bold and italic (e.g., small caps) are represented by single quotes.

• Tabbing is ignored.

Related

ThesaHelp: getting started with Thesa

ThesaHelp: help with notes

ThesaHelp: help with quotation skeletons

ThesaHelp: help with bibliographic references

ThesaHelp: help with topics