Errrm

[hmpf]

This may be an exceedingly stupid question, but...

if there's a sentence somewhere in my thesis that mentions that as a child I read Donald Duck and Tintin, does that constitute something that needs to be properly referenced/documented? And how in the world would one go about documenting something like that? I mean, what would be 'the' date and place of publication for Donald Duck? It's not like that's a single book, or even a single series... it's a multimedia juggernaut. Tintin isn't quite as bad, but also very difficult to document if it should be necessary, due to that passing reference, to incorporate it into the list of works cited...

Help?

Comments

[m31andy.livejournal.com]

Er, definitely not a stupid question - both are still in copyright. There must be other scholars who have referenced them, though, which will give you the form...

[m31andy.livejournal.com]

*re-reads answer*

Ignore me, I was obviously going mad at the time...

[mikes-grrl.livejournal.com]

They would need to be referenced, and since you are talking about a particular time frame (pick a year of your childhood) you should be able to reference specific books. I'm backing Andy, though, in that surely there are scholars who have ref. both in some way before -- or think of Winnie the Pooh, which is similar. Or perhaps if a certain book was in continual publication over a course of years, you could just ref. that.

(Also, can you really frame it as "books you read as a child"? That's a totally subjective and unsupportable statement; of course not really knowing the context and framework of your thesis, I could be talking out my ass. It just struck me as an odd statement to put in an academic treatise...well now I'm curious...)

The context for the remark is...

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

me explaining why my attempt of explaining the larger cultural context of Finder is a bit sketchy. Basically I'm saying "well, I actually don't know that much about comics, because I only came to comics a few years ago and have read relatively little since then, and before that, all I knew about comics was what I learned from reading random Donald Duck and Tintin comics when I was a kid." Obviously, I'm not putting it quite this flippantly in the thesis, though. *g*

And the comics I read really were quite random, so there's no way I could reconstruct what I read back in, say, 1984. Also, it doesn't really *matter*, for the thesis, which parts of the infinite saga of the Duck family I read. I'm not really talking about the content of Donald Duck comics, I'm only using 'Donald Duck' as a kind of shorthand for 'a type of comics that every child in Germany has read, because they were - and are - just absolutely omnipresent, in many different forms." So, I'm talking about the cultural phenomenon of Donald Duck (and Disney comics in general, I just happened to like the ones about Donald best), which in Germany mostly meant a weekly children's magazine titled "Micky Maus", with various Disney comics, and an endless series of small, cheap paperbacks called "Walt Disneys Lustige Taschenbücher" ("Walt Disney's Funny Paperbacks"), produced mostly in Italy, oddly enough. My dad also gave me a couple of the classic Charles Barks stories. So, basically, my Disney 'knowledge' is all over the place, and I have no idea how to reference that.

Whoops.

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

Carl Barks, of course. I just wrote something about a guy named Charles Hatfield, that's who I mixed up with Barks here.

Re: The context for the remark is...

[mikes-grrl.livejournal.com]

Hmmm...can't say you don't come up with interesting problems....

I think your best bet would to say upfront that your habits were all over the map but rather typical for the era, then ref. one or two specific examples of the era as just that: examples. Would be easier than trying to find the proper footnote/endnote style for referencing a whole cultural media phenomenon! LOL!