LaTeX + BibTeX + citations MLA-style + website citations

after seeing how much "fun" a friend of mine had writing his thesis in word, i spent the last two days trying to figure out whether i should use latex instead. right now i'm pretty certain i'll go for it. it took me about a day to add some hacks to a bibtex extension file (or whatever it's called) so as to be able to cite according to mla rules.

i was rather shocked to see that there was no suitable extension available that abided by mla rules _and_ supported website citations. i didn't think this was anything extraordinary, but hey... in case someone reading this runs into the same problem, here's my quick and extremely dirty, yet apparently functional hack of the original mla.bst and mla.sty files with added mla website citation support (actually only the mlaurl.bst is modified, mlaurl.sty is simply a copy).

if i make any further modifications, i'll upload updated versions.

update 2005-07-05: still happy with the modifications i made. only unresolved problem i've come across so far is that the "clickable" version of the automatically generated links in the works cited section don't work correctly (underscores are left out). this does not affect the printed links, so i don't mind too much. i have updated the mlaurl.bst to include tweaked webpage entry to include organization, if given.

update 2005-10-19: updated the mlaurl.bst to allow for a user-defined prefix and suffix. the solution i used earlier didn't work too well with over-long urls. this current version works together with the packages url and hyperref to allow for clickable urls in the resulting pdf document. hyperref also allows you to format the links (color etc.) and to set some pdf options (author etc.). download link

update 2008-11-11: moved download to a different location and updated links

scheinfrei!

today i got my final credit ("schein") - the one i've been waiting for for over 7 months. it's a 2.0, which is fine by me. that means that i have all the credits i need to sign up for my thesis paper.

i also picked up documents from the computer sciences faculty certifying that i finished the first part of my studies there (2 years ago, but i need the papers now). so tomorrow i'll head back to university and sign up for my paper. that will give me 4 months to complete it - setting the deadline to the end of september. details to follow tomorrow once i've officially signed up for it.

The Power and Politics of Blogs by Daniel W. Drezner & Henry Farrell

here's an interesting read that comes close to my topic - from july 2004 by two assistant professors of political science at the university of chicago and the george washington university, respectively:

ABSTRACT
Weblogs occupy an increasingly important place in American politics. Their influence presents a puzzle: given the disparity in resources and organization vis-à-vis other actors, how can a collection of decentralized, nonprofit, contrarian, and discordant websites exercise any influence over political and policy outputs? This paper answers that question by focusing on two important aspects of the “blogosphere”: the distribution of readers across the array of blogs, and the interactions between significant blogs and traditional media outlets. Under specific circumstances – when key weblogs focus on a new or neglected issue – blogs can socially construct an agenda or interpretive frame that acts as a focal point for mainstream media, shaping and constraining the larger political debate.

even if they look at politics & blogs at a slightly different angle, their cited sources are very useful for me.
(in case you hadn't noticed: the headline of this post is linked to their paper as a pdf)

research questions revisited

second attempt at forming my research questions. last time i tried with only one question and a bullet list. it seems to be better to stick to questions, so here goes:

1. how has mainstream media (MSM) developed overall since ~1998? (popularity, influence)
2. how have blogs developed since their ascent in ~1998? (popularity, influence)
3. how do the overall developments compare? can any interactions be found?
4. how has the influence of MSM on elections developed since ~1998?
5. how has the influence of blogs on elections developed since ~1998?
6. how does the development of the influence on elections compare? can any interactions be found?
7. can any predictions be made on the influence of blogs on elections in the future, especially for the UK and DE?

(questions 1-6 will focus on the US; i will however compare with the UK and DE as appropriate)

again, look at the matrix to see how i got here.

now, re the method: i will rely on precompiled data regarding readership numbers of newspapers, viewer numbers of tv broadcasts, etc. due to the possibility of MSM and blogs being biased towards themselves, i will try to obtain data from various sources to paint as objective a picture as possible. to round things off, i hope to be able to present some individual views from members of both MSM and blogs, and from politicians.