Citing the Blog

Since I’ve been writing and reading more about copyright issues, I thought I’d include a page about integrating this blog with published (i.e. print) literature.

As for my practice on the blog, I try to include the citation information for works that I mention and especially those that I quote. I might be a bit less successful in sourcing images that I’ve pulled off the web, often times because it’s not clear where those images came from. So if I have improperly posted anybody’s copyrighted material, please contact me and I will remove it. If you know of the published source for information that I’ve posted without attribution, I’d appreciate that info as well.

In my future published work, when I write about issues we’ve discussed on the blog, I will cite the blog post where appropriate. If you find any of our discussions useful, I’d appreciate it if you were courteous enough to do likewise – free advertising don’t you know.

For citation purposes, the Chicago Manual of Style says blog posts can be cited in text, but for citing the blog itself, it suggests:

Skulking in Holes and Corners. https://jostwald.wordpress.com/.

For a footnote, you can add the author, either of the post (usually me), or the author of the comment that you are referencing.

Any comments you make to the blog are of course your own and I take no responsibility for them and claim no possession of them, although it would be dangerous assume that you were (or I am) the first person to come up with any given idea. I’m not particularly concerned about the ideas and dialogue taking place on the blog, since ideas float around in classrooms, in water-cooler discussions, in seminar rooms, during and after conference paper presentations, as well as on email listservs and websites. In other words, don’t worry about me trying to claim “rights” (whatever that would even be) over the content of the comments. Don’t be surprised, however, if people mention things elsewhere that you’ve mentioned here. OK, maybe you could be a little bit surprised…

The main reason why I’m including this page is because of the many illustrations I’m posting. Graphs, maps and charts published by others that I’ve personally scanned in and posted are cited and assumed to be fair use in the context of this blog – their use also matches the terms of the Creative Commons license cited below. Copyright holders of any of these works should let me know if this is a problem. My main concern with copyright is specifically regarding those images that I personally created (usually in Adobe Illustrator) which took a fair amount of time to create, graphics which I might conceivably publish in the future in some format or another. If you want to use any of the illustrations I have created (see Graphics tag in particular), you may do so, providing:

1. It’s not for commercial use.
2. It’s not published in print without my prior consent.
3. If you use it for a lecture/presentation, you need to clearly indicate, alongside the image, where it came from (i.e. the blog name, URL of the post, and my name). I’d also appreciate it if you let me know that you found the image useful. I might even be willing to incorporate suggested changes into its design, or correct errors you may have found.

For those interested, here’s the Creative Commons license – no commercial reproduction, no altering without consent.

Skulking in Holes and Corners by Jamel Ostwald is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.