biblatex MLA patch

As part of finally getting a jump on my dissertation, I’ve been re-learning LaTeX and BibTeX, and learning biblatex, which seems to be the only thing that offers any hope of turning out LaTeX reports that are MLA formatted. Thanks to James Clawson and his bibtex-MLA package, “MLA BibTeX support” is no longer any oxymoron. It’s a godsend. The current release is very usable, but it has trouble with some corner cases. Workarounds are pretty simple using brackets to force formatting behavior, but since I’m going to be using this a lot and I may have to export the records out of BibTeX at some point, I’m patching the style macros as I go along.

So far, I’ve only had two real issues: the default url handling using \mbox and \hfill forced problematic line breaks and justification errors, and books with editors, but not authors, weren’t handled correctly.

Since James hasn’t supplied copyright information for the code or contact information, I’m supplying the changes as a patch against the MLA.bbx in the current 0.2 release, rather than posting the file I’ve patched: MLAbbx02-0020.patch.

If you’re on OS X or Linux, updating should be as simple as downloading the file, opening a terminal window, and typing

$ patch /path/to/your/MLA.bbx /path/to/MLAbbx02-0020.patch

Best paper ever

Ok, maybe not. But certainly the best article I’ve read in an academic journal in a long time.

In Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original “Adventure” in Code and in Kentucky in the most recent number of Digital Humanities Quarterly, Dennis G. Jertz examines some of the differences between Will Crowther’s original “Colossal Cave Adventure” code and Don Woods’ more famous expanded version. Then he goes on to document his 2005 field trip to the actual cave Crowther based ADVENT on, and some of the changes to the topography over the last 20 years. The original room 12 (“You are in an awkward sloping East/West canyon”), for instance, is now barely passable. The famous horizontal grate has also apparently been replaced by a vertical grate father up the cave.

My great disappointment in reading the article was to discover that, while there is, in fact, a rock marked “Y2″ in large letters, standing in front of it and saying “PLUGH!” accomplishes nothing. This may be, though, because 1) no one knows how to pronounce “PLUGH!” correctly and 2) an appropriately Mavin-esque hollow tone of voice seems difficult to achieve in the surroundings.