[biblio] Entry types for film and tv shows

[Simon Spiegel]

Follwing Paul's email, I want to bring to discussion how film and tv are handled with biblatex.

So far, I know of no style which offers specific supports for film besides my own biblatex-fiwi (though I may have overlooked something). I developed bibiblatex-fiwi for my own PhD thesis at the Seminar of Cinema Studies at the University of Zurich. The Seminar doesn't have a strict style but some general rules which are more shared in the field. Several papers and theses have already been published with biblatex-fiwi, so the style is tried-and-tested.

In the following I will list the types and fields I use for different scenarios.

@film, @video, @misc
=============
The three types are handled equivalently, although I only support @misc for historical reasons and I plan to deprecate it soon. So far, I haven't seen the need to distinguish between @film and @video.

These types are used for any kind of "normal" film, be it feature, documentary, animated, short or whatever. The fields used are the following:

author – is used for the director(s) of the film. Maybe some people think that the author of a film should actually be the screenwriter, but I don't know of any style where the screenwriter is required. And since most films do have director, this seemed like the logical choice.

address/location – country/ies of production. I guess there's little to discuss here.

year/date – year of release

title – the original and/or international release title.

shorttitle – This is used for subsequent in-text citation.

subtitle – the translated title in the specific language of the author, if needed. I see that this is not completely logical. After all, the subtitle is normally an addendum to the title, but since this happens rarely with film, and origtitle seemed even weirder I chose this.

pagetotal – the running time of the film, given in minutes.

These are the fields I use, and at least at my institute, this is all normally needed.

An example:

@movie{Kubrick.S:1968,
	Address = {GB and USA},
	Author = {Kubrick, Stanley},
	Pagetotal = {141},
	Shorttitle = {\film{2001}},
	Subtitle = {2001: Odyssee im Weltraum},
	Title = {2001: A Space Odyssey},
	Year = {1968}}

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (2001: Odyssee im Weltraum). Stanley Kubrick. GB/USA 1968, 141 min.

Other styles need more fields. The MLA style for example insists on much more data. I find this style very weird in this regard, but here are some suggestions for further use:

publisher – for the production company. This seems like an obvious choice.

Depending on the style and the situation you actually have to specify which version or release you're quoting. For example "Criterion Collection DVD 2002" or "recorded on ABC May 2nd 2012". Since I don't need this often I just use the "note" field for this kind information. Now MLA wants you to specify the actual media; film, DVD, VHS, Television. I find the style a bit inconsistent here, but what can we do?

So the question is: Does it make sense to use fields like "type" or "series" for more detailed descriptions?

MLA also requires the main actors; IMO this is completely idiotic. I'm also not sure which name category would be the most logical. We have enough to chose from, so if someone has a suggestion, please let me know.

episodes of a tv series
=============

As you will see I distinguish between different kind of tv shows. Here I mean an individual episode of a show like "Star Trek", "Lost" or "The Simpsons". I also use @film and @video for this, but there are more/other fields.

title – the title of the quoted episode.

maintitle – the title of the show (for example "Lost" or "The Simpsons").

director, location and year basically stay the same.

volume – the season of the specific episode.

number – the number of the quoted episode.

Example:

@movie{Reardon.J:1994a,
	Address = {USA},
	Author = {Reardon, Jim},
	Maintitle = {The Simpsons},
	Number = {6},
	Title = {Treehouse of Horror V},
	Volume = {6},
	Year = {1994}}

THE SIMPSONS. Season 5, Episode 6: Treehouse of Horror V. Jim Reardon, USA 1994.

citing a whole show
=============

If a complete show and not an individual episode is quoted, the requirements are a bit different. Here you normally don't give the director, but the creator(s) of the show. Also, the tv station which produced the show or originally aired it is much more important.

I also use @film and @video for this, but with the help of "entrysubtype". 

If entrysubtype is set as "serial", the whole show is meant.

organization – the tv station

author – is used for the creator(s)

As an example:
 
@movie{Ball.A:2003a,
        Address = {USA},
        Author = {Ball, Alan},
        Date = {2003/},
        Entrysubtype = {serial},
        Organization = {HBO},
	Title = {True Blood}}

would result in TRUE BLOOD. Alan Ball, USA, HBO 2003– .

citing a television broadcast
=============

This is for tv shows which don't have a director in the traditional sense. Think about talk or news shows as examples. Here I also make use of "entrysubtype". If it is set to "tv", I mean a specific show, aired at a certain date.

organization – again the tv station.

date – date of airing. While in the former cases, the year is often enough, we need a precise date here.

maintitle/title – In most cases, there will only be a title ("60 Minutes", "Wetten dass …?", "The Daily Show"). But in some cases, there is the show title and the title of the specific aired installment. In this case "maintitle" is used for the name of the show, "title" for the specific episode.

Example:

@movie{Kassensturz:2012a,
	Date = {2012-05-12},
	Entrysubtype = {tv},
	Organization = {SF1},
	Pagetotal = {23},
	Title = {Kassensturz}}

Will result in: KASSENSTURZ. SF1, May 12 2012.

Note that the lack of an author makes it impossible to use this information to differentiate between different installments of the same show, since they have identical titles. Biblatex 2.0 will introduce an extratitle field which will allow to distinguish between two shows with identical titles (the obvious information printed in the text would be the date of airing. See also: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/55841/biblatex-determine-unique-titles


So this are the types and fields I use. While the tv stuff is quite new and up for discussion, the first part is actually quite set. I wouldn't like to change this if it wasn't absolutely necessary.  But I'm open to any kind of questions, suggestions or criticism.

Ideally, we can agree on some standard shared by all.

Regards

Simon

--
Simon Spiegel
Steinhaldenstr. 50
8002 Zürich

Telephon: ++41 44 451 5334
Mobophon: ++41 76 459 6039

http://www.simifilm.ch

„Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals! Except the weasel.“ Homer Simpson

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