Upgrade StorageViewing Notes without Sources
I am a recent Scribe migrant with a few thousand notes in tow. In Scribe, I titled each of my notes with their relevant date so that I could view notes from a variety of sources in chronological order regardless of their parent files. So, for example, a newspaper article from (and titled as) "1919 12 21 London Times" would appear just before a "1919 12 22 Baghdad Times" article in the list, rather than have all the London Times articles in chronological order followed by all the Baghdad Times articles in chronological order (which is how Zotero organizes my searches).
I would like to be able to view and print my note entries in (alphabetical, numerical, chronological) order by title regardless of the parent files. Are we able to prevent Zotero from grouping our search results by parent file?
I would like to be able to view and print my note entries in (alphabetical, numerical, chronological) order by title regardless of the parent files. Are we able to prevent Zotero from grouping our search results by parent file?
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1. Take notes on the flow of the argument in the source (book, article, etc). The order of the argument gets preserved. Ideally I could see the structure of the argument better than I can with a line of notes, by means of some argument-mapping or outlining capability. Ideally I could see the whole flow and edit it at the same time.
2. Tag or use any part of those running notes for use in a specific section of my own writing outline. Only the atom I want shows up in my writing outline. Easily order and re-order these sections, and look at them as I continue my research.
Just now, I have to choose between running notes (taking all notes for a source in a single Zotero note) or atomized notes, which are not simultaneously editible, or easy to relate to each other (subordination of subpoints in an argument) in meaningful and visual ways.
I can tag notes separately, but tags aren't really that scalable. If I'm working on a thesis, with 5 chapters, each of which might have 10-20 sections, that makes 50-100 buckets to slot things into, and to my mind, tags don't do well when you get up to that quantity. Collections would work, though I think they can't take children without parents.
And even if I can collect, I can't really see what I'm doing (like say I can with 3x5 cards) and group and re-order and align to an in-process outline in preparation for writing.
Anyway, I know that there are more important things on the horizon than note use, but I thought I'd put in my "for what it's worth."
I did try this report making and, having changed the extensions, found that the notes were still grouped by source, even though the sources no longer appeared in the list.
That did the trick. I would, however, like to be able to view just my notes in Zotero (as well as produce printable lists without all that configuration). In fact, I would say that, despite all the benefits of Zotero, this option being absent makes Zotero far less useful for me than Scribe. And it seems like an option that could be easily made available.
The current problem with this is that there's no way to search for attributes of the parent items at the same time you specify to only match notes. While you could manually select each note in the list and generate a report, there's another way:
Say you want to display all the notes (and only notes) from items in your "Foo" collection. Create a saved search with Collection [is] "Foo", check "Include parent and child items of matching items", and save the search as "Foo Items". Then create a saved search with Collection [is] "Foo Items" and Item Type [is] "Note". You should then have a saved search that matches the note items under all items in that collection, and if you generate a report from that (via its context menu), it will show only the notes.
The first saved search can of course match any condition you want, not just Collection (which, really, should match child items itself anyway, but it doesn't currently).
I suppose an advanced search option "Only include child items of matching items" would help here to avoid having to create the second saved search.
For outlining, it may eventually be possible to drag individual child notes into collections (or perhaps "outlines") by themselves and give them an arbitrary order.
Can you offer any idea as to when such a ticket will bare fruit?