Upgrade StoragePetition: higher priority for ticket #672 on sortable child notes
We definitely and strongly support that "child" notes should be allowed to have an independently sortable existence. For example it would be great if they could be sorted into and moved around in collections all while preserving the link to their parent source card. In fact, I think this should be given *very high priority*. Like this Zotero could become the killer research tool for humanities.
To give an example: It would make composing different outlines from an existing base of excerpt and citation notes much, much, much easier, if they could be moved around in collection tree structures.
Please, please, please give ticket 672 (https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/672) higher priority.
To give an example: It would make composing different outlines from an existing base of excerpt and citation notes much, much, much easier, if they could be moved around in collection tree structures.
Please, please, please give ticket 672 (https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/672) higher priority.
Like? I'm curious. To me ticket 672 is a "certainly gotta happen sometime," along with some other things related to notes, (some dreams here). I don't have a feel for all of the priorities of the Zotero project to know whether it should be radically promoted, but at some point, by some means, it sure would be very useful to make notes more useful for the synthetic aspect of academic writing, e.g. by being able to manipulate them onscreen like index cards. (This may, I suspect, best be a job for an extension to Zotero).
Or are you just referring to the previous discussions on semantic markup in notes (structure, emphasis, lists, etc), as well as career-saving tags like "direct quote" or "lazy paraphrase here"?
Judging from the forums, this is the one notes feature users have been demanding strongly and for a long time. Several related tickets emerged from those discussions, such as 1005 and 1006. Getting these done would be a first step to getting 672 done. See also ticket 439 on rich-text editing of notes where the discussion suggests that further semantic markup of notes is planned.
As you both know, there are a number of issues/possibilities with notes that have come up on the forums, with perhaps the most obvious being support for "rich text" (though I'd prefer more building on a subset of HTML than traditional desktop rich text), and for enhancing the semantics of notes and note linking.
To me those are more important priorities, or at the very least equal.
My "disagree" point goes back to the fact I'm really leery of turning Zotero into an outliner, which is what I'm hearing in this request. I really don't think it's at all straightforward to do this well, though I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Ideally, all of these issues would be designed together so that there's a compelling and tight vision behind enhancing notes.
In the actual system, notes are like yellow "post it", short textes about anything, from "must read", quotation, comments, references to the first draft of an personnal essay in a standalone note...
I note that we have more than 50 types to describe an item, more than 50 fields to describe an item, more than 1000 styles to use in bibliography, and no type, no fields no style to describe and use our notes. We can tag notes, and we try to use tag in very imaginative way sometimes, but it doesn't make a standard system to use notes.
Is not easy to think about a standard langage to describe note: the contents of it and how people use it are very personnals.
I begin to use notes in a old Access database almost 10 years ago. I have thousands of it related to my collections of documents. Rapidly it became a mess: I can't sort it, find the last one I wrote, etc., similar as the discusion we have here. I find my homemade solution (it's not ideal and standard!), but I can really improve my notetaking when I start to think about note as a kind of document-item related (or not) with one or sometime many orthers document-item.
In that way, all my notes have now many other fields to describe it: an author (me), 2 dates (created, last access), statut (undone, done, in progress) tags, type (a choice of 8, the 2 most importants are: quotation, comments), localisation (page for books or papers), even I could ad a note to a note to write, for exemple, why I choose this quotation, what is the interest for me.
Zotero should think about notes in a very large perspective, not just a post it: it's a type of "textual item" that scholars produce in millions about items they read. There are many ideas, many very good, about notetaking in different forums. If we summarize all of it, we could probably make a good suggestion to how develop it.
My short-term solution has actually been to use Evernote for note-taking, and Zotero for reference information, tying them together through arbitrary identifiers and a common tagging scheme. In some ways I'd like Zotero's note-taking facilities to improve, but in other ways I'd perhaps rather see there be easier ways to tie together information from different sources: the filesystem for files, zotero for some stuff, Evernote for notes, Freemind for mind maps, etc.
Example: You have lots publications in the zotero library grouped into collections and each publication has several childnotes containing excerpts.
You create a new collection called "my new book" and two subcolletions called "chapter1" and "chapter2".
You look through your excerpts and drag'n drop some of them into "chapter1" and some of them into "chapter2". You can even move them around from "chapter1" to "chapter2" or from an earlier written "old article".
When you are finished, you generate a reports on "chapter1" and "chapter2" and take this as a basis for writing your new book in your favourite word processor.
@bougau: I support your view, that Zotero should think about notes in a large perspective (e.g. formatting, sorting, author etc.), but I would like to add, that Zotero should always keep its ease of use in mind. The simplicity of Zotero's design is one of its really strong points.
@CB: I recently started using citavi which has quite powerful excerpt- and note-taking capabilities combined with source management. Drawback: English version and other OSs than Windows not before 2009. And it's not free.
My brain is a little fuzzy today, so maybe I'm just misunderstanding, but ...
I still stand by my skepticism that Zotero should take on outlining. From a design standpoint, I see it as a problem that nothing else in the Zotero UI is currently sortable. You can't sort attachments, nor bibliographic items. So you'd be adding a new behavior to the UI, and an exceptional one that applies to one object, but not others. Even worse, these objects can be inter-mixed in the UI.
Am I wrong here?
From a user perspective, I would prefer to do outlining in my word-processor. So in my workflow, I might drag-and-drop note content from Zotero into my word-processor. If notes were enhanced with some more intelligence (including adding a concept of "excerpt"), they might get automatically cited.
Please, please, please give ticket 672 (https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/672) higher priority.
Unless I've missed something, I'll stick to using zotero as a mere bibliography manager and will use zotero-footnoted quotations in Microsoft Word to produce the sort of scaffolding-style outlines I'm looking for. I very much wish this could all take place within Z.
If there's an opportunity to contribute directly to funding the implementation of ticket 672, I'd gladly throw as much as $100 at the effort if there were enough other people able to bring the total up to an amount worth the developers' time. I understand there are all sorts of other priorities, but this one would be a real game-changer for many of us, and has been a frustrating step backward from the state of technology several years ago with scribe.
Hopefully,
Isaac
Off topic-ish: I really wonder though, if the idea of some type of bounty-system should be revived - I'm not sure how this is done for other FOSS, but I see no general reason why accumulated user micro-grants couldn't play the same role as large grants from foundations in determining priorities.