Arachniography

What Does Arachniography Mean?

An arachniography is the web-based counterpart of a bibliography. Instead of a collection of book sources, it is a collection of website addresses written in a format similar to that of a bibliography.

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Its purpose is still to act as a list of references that a certain literary work used. The term was coined by Andrew J. Butrica of NASA.

Techopedia Explains Arachniography

An arachniography may be considered as a form of bibliography, but it contains sources purely taken from published work on the web, and not from actual published books or other printed literature.

The name was coined by Andrew J. Burtica of NASA who created a web-based bibliography for NASA’s X-33 project.

“Biblio” would not fit the particular neologism. Burtica first considered the word webography but thought that the word origins weren’t meaningful enough. He then asked his brother, James, a professor at Canada’s Memorial University for a classical word relating to web.

Andrew was pointed to the Greek word “arachne” which means both a spider and its web, and the word arachniography was born.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…