Zotero and DevonThink

Zotero 2.0 and my library

Humanities Computing at the UofC recently had a lunchtime talk about various online bibliographic tools for academics. Hopefully it’ll eventually be online (hint, hint), but we spent most of our time discussing CiteULike (which IDidn’tLike) and the new public beta of Zotero 2.0. I’ve mentioned Zotero a bit in the past, but I want to make sure that I can explain that version 2 offers a lot of great new benefits, especially for someone like me who uses Zotero as narrowly as possible.

First, and this should be enough to upgrade, Zotero stores all of your information in the cloud. There was some uncertainty about whether it would also store your pdfs up there (that would be slow and cumbersome), but your various listings and folders do go up there. This means I no longer have to sync Zotero between my computer on campus and the machine at home. Furthermore, I get a cute little social media profile where you can actually see my bibliographies. It’s been my impression that people in the humanities tend to secretly hoard their bibliographies a bit (my department’s orals lists, for example, are kept secret), almost like how djs tear labels off records to obscure their source material. This is in direct opposition to the sciences. Many people post their .bib files to papers and the like straight to the web. If someone wants to steal my 300-tome (or so) booklist and write “the same” dissertation as I, they are more than welcome to try. In the meantime, I want to give the world some more flipping information.

The social media profile on Zotero also allows one to follow other Zotero users, and, presumably, learn things about their bibliographies. This could be pretty cool in the future. But I haven’t really used it much. This is mostly since I use Zotero for a very specific purpose in my workflow, which I’ll now describe.

This description is for Tim from Virginia Tech, who wrote in to ask about how I tie Zotero together with DevonThink, a program that is far more interesting to me than even the cute-cool social medianess of Zotero 2.0. Zotero I use pretty much for one thing: aggregating a list of titles that can then be exported to a BibTeX file. Oh, and shared with the world, which is in contrast to my DT databases, which are riddled with private information. As one can see, I even have a “not yet sent to bibdesk” folder in Zotero, precisely so I can track that kind of stuff. Zotero is great for pulling stuff quickly off JSTOR or a library catalog, but I absolutely do not use any of its other features, like the little annotation spaces, or the uploading of the pdfs. I don’t want to work in a browser, after all. Scrape the info off the webpage, export to BibDesk, and be done.

The meat comes on the DevonThink side for me. That’s where every book gets a folder filled with notes, citations, pdfs (if I’ve scanned in pages) and the like—including, perversely (considering I use Zotero), the catalog entry for the book on our library’s web directory. It’s a process I do by hand, but that’s ok, since I only create a folder for an object (book, article) once I have something to say about it (or a pdf to drop into it). If all I’ve got is a bilbiographic entry, then I don’t bother putting it in DT. Let it stay in my dissertation.bib file and on Zotero.

I’ve even split up my databases in DT because the “Moacir.dtBase2″ was getting too big (and, well, I didn’t need to have recipes come up in searches on criticism). But I do toss nearly everything into “Dissertation.dtBase2.” When @pareidoliac tweets a link to Delanda or Deleuze, I scrape it into an item in the Dissertation.dtBase2 inbox (and read it whenever). In fact, I’m strongly considering upgrading to DevonThink Pro Office, so that I can subsequently put my entire mess up online. This may be useful, and it may be sort of the WMD version of Zotero.

I’m not sure if this is the best way of doing things, but it’s how I’m doing it for now. Using Zotero much more extensively, I think, would trip up the flow, perhaps by creating redundancies. I tried, for example, to note in Zotero what texts got cited by other texts, but then I abandoned the idea as useless–and then also decided that that sort of meshwork is better suited for DT, anyway.

It’s not likely that my reliance on centralization will lead me to even write in DT (though that’s obviously possible!), if only since Scrivener is so pleasant, but, yes, Tim, I use Zotero for as little as possible.

Tags: bibtex, citeulike, devonthink, Gilles Deleuze, humanities computing, jstor, Manuel DeLanda, scrivener, twitter, zotero