variable spellings of (medieval Jewish) names

Jon Rubin
This is partly a Zotero question, partly a 'best practice question'.

How do people deal with: 1) storing the data in Zotero, and then 2) citing authors who, for various historical reasons, may have various spellings of their names ?
e.g. : Judah Halevi (medieval Jewish philosopher) is also
Yehuda Halevi or ha-Levi; Hebrew: יהודה הלוי; Arabic: يهوذا اللاوي

you get the picture.
It's not so much of a problem for books, where the different spellings (usually) refer to actually distinct objects, and so can be cited separately.

This is a new problem for me, as not my normal area of research, so all advice gratefully received.

Jon
  • adamsmith
    For Zotero, you can't really do much. MLZ is (apart from the legal part) specifically designed with this issue in mind and is able to store multiple versions of a field in different languages and transliterations.

    Can't help on citations, though, sorry.
  • Jon Rubin
    Hi Adam, wondered about MLZ, and clearly need to look in to it but will hold off installing it until I figure out / find out how big a problem this is going to be.
    Is variant naming something that's going to be addressed by the field & item type review ?

    I'm wondering if I can hack a style (e.g. Chicago) to use the 'contributor field' to do something useful, as it's not a field I use very often.
  • adamsmith
    no, at least the first round of field/item times is not going to tackle the more complex multilingual issues. Those are not going to happen this year, unfortunately. The changes being put in place in preparation for the item type/field update will make future such updates much, much easier, but I can't give any reasonable estimate for when MLZ makes it. Could well be multiple years (could also be faster).

    You can't use the contributor field in CSL, unfortunately. It's not accessible from citation styles.
  • Jon Rubin
    Hi Adam, thanks as ever for you speedy feedback, though in the immortal words of Dick Dastardly, drat, drat and double drat. And possibly also: curses, foiled again.

    If there are any historians who have to tackle this kind of problem, then I'd appreciate their input / solutions too.
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