Quote:
Originally Posted by Patricia
My experience is that while scientists often write short but pithy papers where section references are sufficient, things are different in the Humanities. Literature specialists have to refer to author, title and page and often want to use a particular scholarly edition. Philosophers do the same when referring to the work of contemporaries.
I teach a fair amount of Plato and Aristotle and find online texts are a problem.When referring to Plato, it is essential to use Stephanus numbers, which will identify any sentence in his entire oeuvre. These appear as marginal numbers and letters in most print versions in both English and Greek. But the numbers simply don't appear in the online versions of Plato (except for the Perseus Project version). So I can't recommend them to students and don't use online versions myself.
(This is why I've never uploaded a Plato dialogue: without the Stephanus numbers it is useless to me. But with them it is irritating to general readers.)
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In works like this, where the numbers are expected to be present, there is no reason that the online versions couldn't include them. An example epub that I posted in another thread showed one way to do paragraph numbers in a separate column. Something similar could probably be done with the Stephanus numbers (I'm sure there are other ways to do this as well).
As for the numbers being irritating to the general reader, they could easily be toggled with some javascript and an additional stylesheet in a web browser. You just couldn't toggle them in an ebook version, as far as I can see.