Interviews don't look good

robheimburger

Interview citations look odd. Capitals show up in the middle of the footnote, and if I want to designate the type of interview, then the word "interview" is repeated. Is there a better way to do this?

For example:
[Name], interview by [Name], Personal interview, July 1, 2011; interview by [Name], Telephone interview, May 1, 2013.
(Using Chicago style)

aurimas

Which Chicago style exactly?

robheimburger

What I have available to use is Chicago 16th ed., full-note.

aurimas

Is that a single reference? How is this entered in Zotero? You can export the Zotero entry (right-click -> Export Item...) as Zotero RDF and post it to https://gist.github.com/ then link to it here. (you can open the exported RDF file in any text editor to copy its contents)

robheimburger

This was two interviews. I've created a new sample interview to work with:

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/8008831

aurimas

For the above, Zotero produces

Thomas Jefferson, Fake interview, interview by George Washington, Personal interview, July 31, 2000.

The interview in "Personal interview" comes from what you entered in Zotero. Zotero will not throw out parts of text that you entered yourself. So just remove the "interview" part.

The capitalization is also untouched from what you entered. The problem with caps is that it's not always clear that you can lower-case the first word (e.g. proper nouns), so Zotero will usually (never?) not perform conversions to lower case. It will however perform conversions to upper case when necessary (that is always correct). So you should enter this in lower case in Zotero (where appropriate). Same goes for titles: they should be entered in sentence case in Zotero.

Personally, I don't think what you want looks right

Thomas Jefferson, Fake interview, interview by George Washington, personal, July 31, 2000.

(IMO, it should say "personal interview")

robheimburger

That's a step in the right direction, but as you say, not the best.

adamsmith

But what does "personal interview" mean in such a case?

The way I'd expect this cited is
Thomas Jefferson, interview by George Washington, July 31, 2000.

or alternatively

Thomas Jefferson, personal interview, July 31, 2000.

or with title in broadcast:
Thomas Jefferson, Freedom is Good, Slaves are Better, interview by Jonah Lehrer, PBS Broadcast, July 31, 2000.

All of these are feasible with the current formatting of interviews in the style. I think that's the best we can hope to manage (and I think it's quite good, actually)

robheimburger

Thanks for the help.

I used "personal interview" to differentiate it from a telephone interview. I've just deleted "personal," and the citation shows interview. This works well.

One problem remains: after I cite an interview once in a footnote, the second footnote shows:

"interview, July 31, 2000"

without capitalizing the "i" in "interview."

adamsmith

but only if you use suppress author, no? Otherwise it should be Jefferson, interview, July 31, 2000.

robheimburger

That's right. Thanks for the help.