Citing the current time of a video

jdblue
Hi,

I searched through the docs and the forums but couldn't find an answer to this. I'm doing research and need to use a lot of videos for it. I need to specify the times (in seconds/minutes elapsed) of where the relevant information is in the videos, but I haven't been able to get Zotero to do this automatically. There are so many videos I have to cite that it's just not feasible to cite their time codes by hand. Is there some way to automatically do this already, or should I request this feature?

Your help and advice is greatly appreciated!
~J.D.
  • adamsmith
    can't be done currently. You don't need to start a separate thread for a feature request, just continue here and explain in some more detail what you'd like Zotero to do. I'm a little skeptical whether there is a way to do this automatically, but let's see.
  • jdblue
    edited December 1, 2013
    Thanks for your help!

    Ideally, what I'd like Zotero to do is, when citing a video, to include the current elapsed time of the video playing. This should be possible multiple times -- for instance, you start a video, stop it at a relevant point after 2min have gone by and the citation will read that it's 2min in. Then continue watching the movie, pause it at 4min, then cite it again, the second citation reading 4min. --This ability is especially useful when a video is really long (e.g. a movie/documentary), there are multiple important parts that are being cited, or there is only one small relevant part (e.g. a news cast which has many stories, only one of which is relevant).

    For YouTube videos, specifically, according to the API, there is a javascript function to retrieve that information: https://developers.google.com/youtube/js_api_reference?csw=1#Playback_status -- though my programming experience is not with extensions or plugins, specifically, so I'm not sure if this is something that can be helpful in implementing that feature.

    If there's any other information I can provide that might help, please let me know and I'd be happy to. I hope my description and link were helpful.

    Keep up the amazing work on Zotero, it's awesome! :)
    ~J.D.
  • adamsmith
    so you want Zotero to create a separate entry based on the timestamp of the video every time you click the URL bar icon and then cite that? Honestly I doubt we'll implement that - creating the citations would also be a mess, btw., since you wouldn't be able to easily distinguish the different versions of the same video. So I don't think there will be any way around you manually (i.e. in the suffix field of the word processor plugin) adding the timestamps to your citations, sorry.
  • jdblue
    edited December 1, 2013
    Well, thanks anyway. Worse comes to worse, if I really need it, I'll just implement it myself -- thankfully I have the programming experience to do it.

    Regards,
    J.D.

    P.S. - It didn't have to be a separate citation all together, it could've just included a list (array) of timestamps that are relevent, adding additional timestamps to that list every time the link is clicked to create a citation.
  • aurimas
    The way this would be done for a book or chapter when a particular entry needs to be cited is to include the page number with the in-text citation and have a single bibliographic entry for a book/chapter. There would also be only one single entry for a book/chapter in Zotero.

    It seems like you want to do exactly that but with videos? AFAICT, your only problem is that you want to note down the elapsed time for any interesting and citable material in the video. I understand that clicking the URL bar button would be more convenient, but couldn't you just note the times in an attached note? (you could even include a note explaining why that time point is important...)
  • alandsloane
    I'd agree with aurimas' response above. What jdblue is asking for would be analogous to creating "citations" at text locations as one read a PDF or HTML article. That's not the model of any bibliographic software that I know of. To do this sort of thing with articles I use notes, and put in page numbers with a cut&pasted quote or my own comments. Then I write up from the notes, and manually include the page number. I do accept that this would be much more awkward when working with video (or audio) files.

    But what really comes to mind is that the sort of tool jdblue really wants - and would do much better with imho - is something like Transana (http://www.transana.org/). It costs US$65 for a single-user licence, and is open-source (mostly written in Python and developed at Madison) so he can put his programming skills to use if he needs to improve on it.

    Alternatively most Qualitative Data Analysis software nowadays can do much of what Transana does, and most Universities seem to have site licenses for one or other of NVivo, Atlas or MaxQDA.
  • shezza27
    edited October 16, 2016
    Hi,

    one workaround I use from time to time is to change the page option when citing to 'section' or something else that seems relative. unfrotunately there is no time option though.

    To do this, all you need to do when you are citing, is search your reference from within word etc using the zotero plugin, then hit return to confirm your selected reference. then with the zotero floating window still open, click on your reference, then click on where is says 'page' and choose an alternate option from the drop down menu, then enter the time or alternate infor you want to use with your citation.

    Not ideal, but can be handy!
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