Recently, a post by a blogger that I follow featured a new web-tool called "Citebite" that quickly and easily creates for its users, not a hyperlink, but a deep link, a link that takes the reader who clicks on it directly to the quoted passage, no matter how far down the page it appears or how deeply buried in the website it is. It's pretty cool. (And there's even a bookmarklet you can add to your browser toolbar.) There are lots of ways to use to it, as Traci Gardner points out on her blog. Let me show you how it works.
If students wanted to quote a passage from one of my blog posts, for instance, they could easily include a link to my entire blog (which isn't very useful to the reader) or to the exact post from which they quoted (which would be a bit more useful), but here's a link to a specific passage from a specific post in which Nygaard discusses the value of poetry, and that's really useful! (Do you see how I "hid" the link behind a part of my sentence which paraphrases the text I linked to?) Students could also provide the text, properly contained within quotation marks, putting the deep link behind it, like this:
In a blog post entitled "Frozen Flowers, Living Poems," Nygaard says, "And you never know--the poem you read in class today (even if you don't now understand it or see any value in it) might help you in the future to deal with loss, to understand pain, to make sense of your experiences."Click on that linked quotation above, and you go directly to the passage in its original context on my blog. That's pretty sweet. It makes it much easier for the reader to see exactly where the quotation came from. And because the sentence containing the quotation includes the author's name and the title of the post, and also indicates that the quotation comes from a blog post, there'd be no real need for an in-text parenthetical reference. The reader can find out everything he or she wants to know about the original source by clicking the deep link. I can also use the CiteBite link in my list of Works Cited (see the very bottom of this post) so that the WC entry also directs my readers to the exact location of the cited text! (Obviously, this would only work if I was quoting one single passage from a source.)
Here's the result of making the CiteBite: I'm provided with a link which I can apply to the quoted text in my project, and CiteBite shows me, in the window, where that link will take my readers. |
[Update: I've found another such tool, called TLDRify.com that works just like CiteBite, except it seems to be a bit more stable, less glitchy. Try it out!]
Work Cited
Gardner, Traci. "Take a Bite Out of the Web with CiteBite." Web log post. Bedford Bits: Ideas for Teaching
Composition. Bedford / St. Martin's, 6 July 2011. Web. 6 Feb. 2015.
Nygaard, Susan. "Frozen Flowers, Living Poems." Web log post. Dr N's Blog. 11 Dec. 2014. Web. 25 Jan. 2015.
(WC entries created with EasyBib.)
(WC entries created with EasyBib.)
I agree - this is our future and the sooner the better, I say! Love CiteBite if it does what it promises and look forward to the same sort of tool for other resources. Great news.
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