Recent changes to Chicago?

nathan.hopson

Since a few days ago, capitalization in my Chicago references has gone totally bonkers.
For example, this entry in my Zotero database:

Takahashi, Tomio. “Amerika no furontia gakusetu to Nihon no henkyō shigaku.” Hikaku Bunka Kenkyū Nenpō 6 (February 22, 1994): 1-17.

is cited as:

Takahashi, Tomio. “Amerika No Furontia Gakusetu to Nihon No Henkyō Shigaku.” Hikaku Bunka Kenkyū Nenpō 6 (February 22, 1994): 1-17.

Note that the article title has been changed. It shouldn't be (Romanized Japanese rules), and never was before. This seems to have been simultaneous to renaming the citation styles, which may be helpful in figuring out the issue.

Am I missing something here? Bottom line is that I need to restore the proper citation I've been using for several years with Zotero, but I can't figure out how to do that.

Looking forward to your assistance.

PS: I am considering migrating to the multilingual version in the hopes that such issues might be worked out. If anyone knows more about this, please let me know to ease my decision.

Thanks

dstillman

I assume you're using 3.0rc1? In 3.0rc1, the redundant Chicago "(Note without Bibliography)" style was replaced with the main Chicago "(note)" style, since a "without bibliography" style is equivalent to just not generating the bibliography.

There were probably minor differences between the two versions (and the newer version is more likely to be correct based on standard Chicago rules). Someone else will have to comment on the actual style properties, though.

Nothing to do with regular vs. multilingual.

adamsmith

Chicago has recently been changed to use title case. That's correct for all English language titles, but not, as you note, for any other language.
Zotero will not use title case if the language field is populated and starts with anything different from "en". So put ja-JP in the language field for your Japanese citations and you'll be fine.

(edit - if really need be I can tell you how to make a custom version of the Chicago style csl that doesn't title case ever - but in the interest of doing this right in the long term you should really just populate the language field. Multilingual Zotero works the same way in that respect, so even if you switch to that you'd have to do that.

fbennett

The Chicago styles were updated to apply text-case at the start of the year. That's correct for English entries in Chicago, but in the Zotero 3.0 beta, it can be suppressed for non-English entries. You have a few options:

(1) Make a local version of your Chicago style that doesn't apply text-case="title" to article titles. This is quick in the short term, but will require manually updating your local style to reflect updates to the official style version. It will also mean that your personal database items are a bit less flexible, since entries that do need title case for Chicago would be written in literally as title case in the database, which is not recommended.

(2) You can install the Zotero 3.0 beta, and add "ja" in the Language field of your Japanese entries. This may take some work, depending on the size of your database, but you'll be all set once it's done.

(3) You can install MLZ, and again add "ja" in the Language field of your Japanese entries. MLZ will behave the same as Zotero 3.0 on your current content, but will allow you to record Japanese names and titles in the original script, supplemented with (optionally) kana transliterations, romanizations, and translations. You can then generate mixed-script citations in various forms. The downside of installing MLZ is that you lose support from the core Zotero developers, which might be something you want to avoid.

(Edit: ... and what adamsmith says :)

nathan.hopson

Thank you all for your help. I will try playing with some of these solutions.

My database is literally thousands of entries, of which more than half are affected by this change. I will post my results here when I get the stomach for it.

I guess this isn't the right place for a feature request for being able to select and edit one common field of multiple entries, but that sure would be nice. (So would a find-and-highlight for notes, but that's really off topic...)

Thank you again.

adamsmith

batch editing has been requested multiple times and is going to happen eventually. Part of the problem, I understand, is that you need a really good GUI to make it work effectively.

fbennett

If you are a little bit familiar with programming (or have a friend who is), batch editing is possible using a Firefox plugin. After confirming that the changes we've suggested produce the results you're after for a limited set of entries, feel free to post back; we can provide pointers to the relevant info.

erazlogo

Any chance MLZ features will be included in a future version of Zotero?

(3) You can install MLZ, and again add "ja" in the Language field of your Japanese entries. MLZ will behave the same as Zotero 3.0 on your current content, but will allow you to record Japanese names and titles in the original script, supplemented with (optionally) kana transliterations, romanizations, and translations. You can then generate mixed-script citations in various forms. The downside of installing MLZ is that you lose support from the core Zotero developers, which might be something you want to avoid.

adamsmith

That was certainly Frank's original idea and I think the hope is still that that's going to happen. One of the nice things that Frank did with MLZ is that you hardly notice the multilingual features if you don't use them.

ses278

I use mostly German entries and I've tried adding "ger" to the language field and turning off the automatic capitalization. It is still automatically capitalizing my entries and not following how I have the title entered into zotero. Are there any other fixes? I am running 3.0.1 on Mac OSX Lion. Thanks for any advice you can give...this is driving me nuts in the final stages of my dissertation!

nathan.hopson

I don't think it's "ger." Japanese is: "ja-JP" (Japanese language, Japan.) So try "de-DE."

adamsmith

I'll have a look - in the meantime, try adding de-DE in the language field. GER doesn't exist as a language code, Zotero shouldn't be bothered by that, but maybe it is.

Edit: Yes confirmed - ger doesn't work, de (or de-DE) does. I don't think that's right - according to Frank anything other than "en" should turn off title case - but it should allow you to work with this.

ses278

Thanks! It worked!

fbennett

We're currently ignoring things that don't look like valid two-character ISO language codes, since the field content isn't structured, and might contain random comments or other field-abuse stuff (because the field "isn't used").

johnsonsf

I have been having this same capitalization problem and am grateful for the explanations in this discussion. However, can someone explain to me why "fr" works correctly for French titles and "French" (which is one auto-populated option, along with "français") does not?
I.e.:

with "French":

Balty, Janine. 1995. Mosaïques Antiques Du Proche-orient: Chronologie, Iconographie, Interprétation. Annales Littéraires De l’Université De Besançon 551. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.

with "français":

Balty, Janine. 1995. Mosaïques Antiques Du Proche-orient: Chronologie, Iconographie, Interprétation. Annales Littéraires De l’Université De Besançon 551. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.

with "fr" (correctly formatted):

Balty, Janine. 1995. Mosaïques antiques du proche-orient: Chronologie, iconographie, interprétation. Annales littéraires de l’Université de Besançon 551. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.

It seems the only auto-populated option in the language field that will produce correct capitalization for French (at least with Chicago author-date) is "fr". Is this a bug or a feature?

And, two further questions:

1. Is there an official Zotero list of language codes?

2. Long term might there be an option in preferences to turn off automatic capitalization? I'm running into this problem multiple times a day.

Thanks,
Scott

adamsmith

1. As fbennett says above, Zotero is looking for 2 letter ISO codes, aka ISO 639-1. See e.g. here: http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php
So the fact that it currently only accepts fr is a feature, though one that may very well change (see here: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/22054/making-sure-language-codes-are-captured-where-available/#Item_2 )

2. Unlikely. It's a better idea to keep your library in order. It is not terribly hard to take out title casing for a custom version of a style if you really want to
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step
remove all instances of text-case="title"