Zotero for Biblical Studies

Joshua

I am using Zotero for Biblical Studies and would like to solicit some advice on "best practices" for note taking. Specifically, for organizing notes related to Bible versus and chapters.

Zotero's tagging system is great for tagging a note that is topical in nature, which is about half of my note taking. The hurdle I have encountered is using Zotero in a logical and organized fashion for attributing notes to Bible versus or ranges. This is especially important when studying books that are systematic in approach where passages from all over the Bible are discussed.

Tags could be part of a solution but tagging Book/Chapter/Verse would get very, very bloated and it wouldn't work well with verse ranges. Seeing as browsing notes shows the first line of a note, I have pondered using a Tag for the Book, and then using the first line for Book / Chapter / Verse.

An example of this would be Gordon Fee's Pauline Christology. Under this volume I would create a note for his work on Philippians chapter 2, verse 9 on page 393.

Tag: Philippians
Note: Philippians 2:9 pg. 393. Fee counters Dunn's Adamic Christology by...

I am aware that the advanced search is pretty powerful, but I would *really* prefer to be able to browse my notes quickly on a topic as well as book/verse.

Two problems with this method are:

(1) By selecting a tag from the tag selector menu not only shows the notes/volumes that have the tag, but also shows ALL the tags in a volume (even if the volume itself does not have the tag). If I have 20 books, journals, etc. with a Philippians tag, and each volume has 30-100 notes, of which only 5% or so are in the range I am looking for--what a mess to scroll through!

(2) With the advanced search you run into a similar issue. If I search the tag, "John" and for the words "1:1" in the notes the results are not only notes with the Tag "John" and words in the note "1:1" but also EVERY other note under the volume. Sure, they are not bolded, but I still presented.

(**Btw, I would consider this a user interface flaw that should probably be addressed. Just my opinion, maybe others benefit from this feature.**)

So what would others suggest for best practices?

I am finding Zotero to be a wonderful product and very useful, but slightly cumbersome for my specific use. I know a lot of people in the Biblical studies field are looking at Zotero and it would be great to find a "best practices" to use Zotero in a way that 2 years from now I am not KICKING myself for "doing it all wrong." Browsing through a couple hundred volumes, and all the attached notes, weeding through bolded/greyed out notes sounds a little tedious to me.

Thanks for your time and suggestions!

Joshua

bdarcus

The real solution to your problem of identifying the location of the content you are annotating is improvements in Zotero.

Shorter-term, people seem to generally recommend putting the location in a consistent way at the top of your notes. That way you can sort the notes by that IIRC.

erazlogo

(1) By selecting a tag from the tag selector menu not only shows the notes/volumes that have the tag, but also shows ALL the tags in a volume (even if the volume itself does not have the tag). If I have 20 books, journals, etc. with a Philippians tag, and each volume has 30-100 notes, of which only 5% or so are in the range I am looking for--what a mess to scroll through!

(2) With the advanced search you run into a similar issue. If I search the tag, "John" and for the words "1:1" in the notes the results are not only notes with the Tag "John" and words in the note "1:1" but also EVERY other note under the volume. Sure, they are not bolded, but I still presented.

(**Btw, I would consider this a user interface flaw that should probably be addressed. Just my opinion, maybe others benefit from this feature.**)

There is a ticket for this--many other people are waiting for this feature also.

zmg

Me too ... and it would be so great if zotero would support child notes, that could be sorted into collections on their own. I desperately wish for that to create outlines. Using tags is just not the same as dropping bits of thought (notes) into folders and subfolders and moving them around from one folder to the other.

sigh - I was really enthousiatic when I first saw zotero: it seemed to be what I was looking and longing for for a long time because it is so simple to use.

scot

2nding bdarcus. There may be no killer technique which gets you what you want in the near term. Zotero needs sophisticated note handling, beginning with the ability to get search results (as noted above) with only what you need.

I would love to see a system where (1) notes are full-fledged items in the database, and can have their own metadata in all the fields relevant to them (2) there is a javascripty way to make notes cross-reference to other works in your database, or to ancient works like religious texts and classical authors--with the possiblity to refer to an exact location (pages, sections, chapters or verses) or an arbitrary range. This would allow the use of Zotero to make reading notes or commentary for close text-based work. Commentary-type work needs to make repeated exact reference to a source text, and it would be nice to include this information in a way that is machine-readable (for searching in an intellignt way, jumping off to local or web copies of those texts, etc).
(3) notes have a minimal system of semantic structure, to allow standard structuring mechanisms, and research-related things like "direct quote," "paraphrase which needs citing", etc. (4) notes can be 'published' in note-sets on a distributed system of repositories with a user-selected liscence. These sets can be 'imported', or better, 'subscribed to' in a way that lets subscribers have on-demand access to dynamic content.

I think the long term vision (of Dan Cohen etc) for Zotero does include means to share notes and make them more useful for the synthesizing/writing process. I remember reading early hints of this when Zotero was first being released.

Anyway, for now, you could experiment with a more sophisticated first line for your notes, which would include headers like ~Phil.1.1 or ~1Macc.3.12
(Basically a unique character like a tilde, followed by the SBL standard abbreviation for the book with spaces removed, followed by the chapter and verses separated by, say, dots.) I can't test this at the moment, but this might let you do a single search from the quick search box for either anything on a particular book (~gen) or anything on a particular chapter (~ex.15) or anything on a verse (~deut.5.12). If it works, it might let you forget tags altogether, which would save a step.

It doesn't solve the problem of the extra non-bolded siblings. However, you might also experiment with reports. If I'm not mistaken you can get 'just the notes you want' if you send them to a report. You get the whole note text as well. Of course, ideally you'd be able to order and annotate such a result set to use for synthesis and writing (think: index cards), but that also remains in the future.

scot

My above suggestion for note headers referring to biblical references doesn't work, but the following does. Make note headers like:

~1Macc3.15
~Phil1.1
~1Cor1.12

And searches like:
~gen
~ex15
~ex15.2
~deut5 .12

(note in particular the space before the '.12' in the last example. Something about the way the Zotero Quick Search bar parses its input makes it necessary to have the verse as a second search term. It works fine, though). And if Quick Search is slow, prepend the search with a double quote, so Zotero doesn't start searching until you're done typing.

Note that if you want the notes to appear in chapter-verse order, you have to throw zeros into your tags and searches:

~Matt05.12
~Ps002.07

And if you wanted full canonical order, you'd have to go over the top and do:

~02Ex01.01 and ~66Rev02.02 (or ~nt01Matt05.16)

But that seems a bit cumbersome to me.

Reports DO only include search results, by the way, so that helps some. I think you have to do a regular search query (not quick search), and save the search. Then right click the resulting saved search name and select "Generate Report..."

Note that such reports don't seem to order the resulting notes by their titles, which makes excessive zero-adding even more unnecessary.

You can also include such references anywhere in the note. They needn't be the in the first line/title if you would rather put a summary or a page number there.

erazlogo

Note that such reports don't seem to order the resulting notes by their titles, which makes excessive zero-adding even more unnecessary.

They do if you append "?sort=note" to the url.

scot

Aah, of course, the old, old "?sort=note" trick. :) Thanks for mentioning it.

dstillman

?sort=note shouldn't be necessary in Zotero 1.0.5 or later. Is there a case where it still appears to be?

erazlogo

?sort=note shouldn't be necessary in Zotero 1.0.5 or later. Is there a case where it still appears to be?

That's correct--sorts by title/first line in note just fine automatically for me--sorry I forgot about that.