Just a short note to bump this item. I have put up a fresh tarball containing hacked database images and Firefox installers, one each based on the Zotero 1.0 branch and on the development trunk. This is only for testing, certainly not production, but I would be grateful for feedback from anyone with an interest who is able to take a look at the code, or to take the kit out for a trial spin. If I'm totally on the wrong track, now is probably a good time to find out!
Bumping this item again. I've put up another version of the Bluebook kit, with a modified 1.0 branch Zotero, database, and style file. The feature extensions to Zotero (12 in all) are interrelated, and I haven't tried to separate them out into individual patches. But I've written up a short list of changes, and keyed comments in the patch to the list. The tarball is now on the web here.
This material incorporates all of the various changes that I've posted to the forums about over the past few weeks. I hope it is of use to the development team.
I can't really review these patches, since almost none of the original code is mine, but I've created a ticket. Upload your patch there (with a .patch extension), and we'll see if we can get it reviewed, though, since this is a pretty big patch, I don't know how soon that might happen.
A few quick notes before you upload the patch, though:
1) There are too many changes here for 1.0, so the patch will need to be against the trunk.
2) I noticed that you made some changes to the CSL schema. I mentioned this before, but we can't make any unilateral changes to the schema, so you'd have to propose your schema changes on the XBib list and get consensus there before we could support them.
3) If I understand it correctly, container author, while existing in the CSL spec, is something that would be part of hierarchical item type support in Zotero, not a regular creator type. Now, it's possible that we should add it as a stopgap solution (along with, for example, original publication field) and simply migrate that data into parent items once there's more sophisticated support, but we'd have to make that decision. (Also, you have the localized term as "Sponsor", which wouldn't be right for a generic creator type. We can map item-type-specific fields to base fields if necessary.)
Thanks for this, Dan. I patched the changes into the trunk and did a little clicking around to see that things work there as well. Patch is now loaded to the ticket. Thanks for the reminder about the schema; it was on my mind, but the list was inactive during the holiday and I had free time, so I just plunged ahead to get things in place for local use. I will follow up though.
The more I hear about hierarchical relations support, the more I like it. I understand the difficulties, and we can certainly adapt what we provide for student use locally in the interim. If there is any way I can help other than by staying out of the way, let me know (I'm happy to do that too, of course :).
If anyone hitting this thread would like to take a look, I have put up a click-install experimental version of Zotero with (most of) the infrastructure for full Bluebook support. It covers only secondary material at the moment (no statutes or cases yet), but secondary materials, including id. and supra are handled correctly. I'll be working on statutes and cases over the next couple of weeks, so that's coming.
This is based on a recent Zotero Sync 1.5 development snapshot. All of the caveats relating to that series apply (plus the additional warning that I wrote my first full line of Javascript code about a month ago).
I am sure someone has already done this, but I made some changes to the publicly available style to do short cites to cases correctly (i.e., Name, 432 F.3d at 1, as opposed to using supra). My version is available at:
If someone with more Zotero style experience could figure out why periods seem to be not added to the end of some citations, that would be useful. I am not seeing a pattern.
Also, does anyone know how to not print the page numbers after "id" when the previous "id" referred to the same page? I briefly looked at the CSL docs but I didn't see anything useful.
I've done some work on an alternative Bluebook style, but it is not yet compatible with mainstream Zotero, and isn't suitable for anything more than experimentation (a caveat that applies to everyone, including me). I'm tied up at the moment with a writing a new CSL citation processor for Zotero. When that's out of the way, I'm planning to turn back to the Bluebook stuff, probably sometime during the summer.
If you're technically inclined and would like to take a crack at adapting the style to be CSL conformant and to run in the new processor, let me know. I could certainly use a hand!
(On the periods thing, that's a small bad habit of Zotero. Just refresh the citations, and the period pops up.)
Right now I am just trying to get the style to be good enough for a paper I am working on, but I might have some time to help out with more significant changes once I graduate.
The period thing is really annoying. I have over 250 citations in my paper, and refreshing all of the citations doesn't seem to fix them. I am not looking forward to going through them one by one.. Oh well, I guess it is still better than managing citations by hand, which is what most of my classmates seem to do.
I have been taking a stab at an alternate Bluebook citation style. I've never edited any code before, so I'm running into a few problems. Can anybody tell me the proper variable name for statutes (i.e., what to put in a <text variable=“??????”> syntax line)? Thanks. --Matt
One more question - does the "code number" field in Statutes map to a particular text variable? I tried the text variable names in the chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/csl.js list, but nothing seemed to work.
if it maps to something it is "number", but I'm not sure - the bill number and the docket number both map to "number"
I tried to have the list here
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/csl_syntax_summary#variables
as complete as possible.
Once you're done with your style, I'll be happy to upload it to the repository for you if you post it somewhere to download.
Not sure how it's implemented in Zotero, but I think a "code number" is technically analogous to a "volume number"; right? E.g. the code is in fact a periodical?
Matt, do you have an idea what the "Code" and "Code Number" fields of the Statute/legislation type are actually meant to contain? It would be useful to have sample cites to illustrate. I'm not that familiar with US legislation, and I'm kind of at a loss myself.
I'm so impressed with how Zotero handles Bluebook, but I have one minor error to point out. When citing a law review article Zotero's output includes two spaces between the volume number the law review title.
go here
http://gist.github.com/238180
download the style using the "Raw" link on the top right.
After downloading, Install by dragging the file to an open FF window.
This should fix it - please report back, so I can update the style in the repository.
I've noticed that when I cite a journal article in Bluebook, Zotero inserts the Publication field when it should be using Journal Abbr. field for the journal name. Can we fix this?
This was a simple fix, I've gone ahead and checked it into the repository. To confirm that it's working correctly, download this file by clicking on the "raw" link, save it with an extension ".csl", and drag the saved file into Firefox.
I was wondering how to handle certain law review and other scholarly citations. The default for the second time you cite an article uses the authors' name
Laurens and Walker, supra note 10
But if Laurens and Walker have written a ton of stuff together, and you cite a lot of it, that convention gets confusing. If you have cited to 5 of theri articles in note 10 you can get
Laurens and Walker, supra note 10; Laurens and Walker, supra note 10; Laurens and Walker, supra note 10;Laurens and Walker, supra note 10;Laurens and Walker, supra note 10
so the Bluebook allows you to substitute a short title for the names:
Social Facts, supra note 1; Social Authority, supra note 10; Social Frameworks, supra note 10; etc
Zotero has a field for short title -- can it be used in this way and how?
The bluebook style doesn't do this yet. It's not obvious how it should be handled, either, so it's something we should discuss. The obvious approach would be to automatically add a "hereinafter" parenthetical to cites for which a short title is available -- but that may be too aggressive. What do you think?
(Note that CSL can't actually do this at present, since the short version of the title variable is not a first-class variable in CSL -- it is accessible only by calling the "title" variable with form="short").
The problem is this - either we have the "if position="subsequent" without a short title - but then we won't be able to distinguish between different works by same author - or we have the subsequent citations all with short-titles (against the citation guideline). I'm not sure how testing for the presence of a short-title, even if possible, would help.
We would actually need to be able to test if the same author(s) are present in another document to get this right- there's nothing even close in csl at the moment as far as I can see. The closest is if disambiguate="true" but that's still quite distinct.
This is, btw. an issue that's not limited to bluebook. MHRA has the same citation rule.
Upgrade Storage
This material incorporates all of the various changes that I've posted to the forums about over the past few weeks. I hope it is of use to the development team.
I can't really review these patches, since almost none of the original code is mine, but I've created a ticket. Upload your patch there (with a .patch extension), and we'll see if we can get it reviewed, though, since this is a pretty big patch, I don't know how soon that might happen.
A few quick notes before you upload the patch, though:
1) There are too many changes here for 1.0, so the patch will need to be against the trunk.
2) I noticed that you made some changes to the CSL schema. I mentioned this before, but we can't make any unilateral changes to the schema, so you'd have to propose your schema changes on the XBib list and get consensus there before we could support them.
3) If I understand it correctly, container author, while existing in the CSL spec, is something that would be part of hierarchical item type support in Zotero, not a regular creator type. Now, it's possible that we should add it as a stopgap solution (along with, for example, original publication field) and simply migrate that data into parent items once there's more sophisticated support, but we'd have to make that decision. (Also, you have the localized term as "Sponsor", which wouldn't be right for a generic creator type. We can map item-type-specific fields to base fields if necessary.)
The more I hear about hierarchical relations support, the more I like it. I understand the difficulties, and we can certainly adapt what we provide for student use locally in the interim. If there is any way I can help other than by staying out of the way, let me know (I'm happy to do that too, of course :).
This is based on a recent Zotero Sync 1.5 development snapshot. All of the caveats relating to that series apply (plus the additional warning that I wrote my first full line of Javascript code about a month ago).
Frank Bennett
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/399042/bluebook_lawrev.csl
If someone with more Zotero style experience could figure out why periods seem to be not added to the end of some citations, that would be useful. I am not seeing a pattern.
Also, does anyone know how to not print the page numbers after "id" when the previous "id" referred to the same page? I briefly looked at the CSL docs but I didn't see anything useful.
I've done some work on an alternative Bluebook style, but it is not yet compatible with mainstream Zotero, and isn't suitable for anything more than experimentation (a caveat that applies to everyone, including me). I'm tied up at the moment with a writing a new CSL citation processor for Zotero. When that's out of the way, I'm planning to turn back to the Bluebook stuff, probably sometime during the summer.
If you're technically inclined and would like to take a crack at adapting the style to be CSL conformant and to run in the new processor, let me know. I could certainly use a hand!
(On the periods thing, that's a small bad habit of Zotero. Just refresh the citations, and the period pops up.)
Frank Bennett
Right now I am just trying to get the style to be good enough for a paper I am working on, but I might have some time to help out with more significant changes once I graduate.
The period thing is really annoying. I have over 250 citations in my paper, and refreshing all of the citations doesn't seem to fix them. I am not looking forward to going through them one by one.. Oh well, I guess it is still better than managing citations by hand, which is what most of my classmates seem to do.
Greg
Do you mean statute names (the Name of Act field in Zotero)? That's probably just "title".
the whole list of what is what is in the csl.js
chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/csl.js
I tried to have the list here
http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/csl_syntax_summary#variables
as complete as possible.
Once you're done with your style, I'll be happy to upload it to the repository for you if you post it somewhere to download.
http://gist.github.com/238180
download the style using the "Raw" link on the top right.
After downloading, Install by dragging the file to an open FF window.
This should fix it - please report back, so I can update the style in the repository.
http://gist.github.com/259866
http://www.zotero.org/styles/bluebook_lawrev/dev?install=1
I was wondering how to handle certain law review and other scholarly citations. The default for the second time you cite an article uses the authors' name
Laurens and Walker, supra note 10
But if Laurens and Walker have written a ton of stuff together, and you cite a lot of it, that convention gets confusing. If you have cited to 5 of theri articles in note 10 you can get
Laurens and Walker, supra note 10; Laurens and Walker, supra note 10; Laurens and Walker, supra note 10;Laurens and Walker, supra note 10;Laurens and Walker, supra note 10
so the Bluebook allows you to substitute a short title for the names:
Social Facts, supra note 1; Social Authority, supra note 10; Social Frameworks, supra note 10; etc
Zotero has a field for short title -- can it be used in this way and how?
thanks
Isis
(Note that CSL can't actually do this at present, since the short version of the title variable is not a first-class variable in CSL -- it is accessible only by calling the "title" variable with form="short").
The problem is this -
either we have the "if position="subsequent" without a short title - but then we won't be able to distinguish between different works by same author -
or we have the subsequent citations all with short-titles (against the citation guideline).
I'm not sure how testing for the presence of a short-title, even if possible, would help.
We would actually need to be able to test if the same author(s) are present in another document to get this right- there's nothing even close in csl at the moment as far as I can see. The closest is if disambiguate="true" but that's still quite distinct.
This is, btw. an issue that's not limited to bluebook. MHRA has the same citation rule.