Upgrade StorageCiting archival letters in zotero
Hello all, I was wondering if you might be able to help. I am working on a thesis based on historical family letters, which are all primary sources not previously published. When trying to cite them under the type "letter" in zotero with the Chicago Manual of Style (full note), I have encountered several problems:
1. When the letter is first fully cited, there is no option for citing the place (where the letter was sent from / to).
More importantly, when the same letter is cited again in the same text, the shortened version has several major problems:
2. the shortened citation only mentions the family name of author and recipient. This is especially a problem when working with family letters, as all involved have the same family name, with no way to distinguish between them.
3. the shortened citation doesn't mention the date of the specific letter. This is a problem when dealing with more than one letter from the same author to the same recipient, as there is no way to distinguish between several letters.
I have tried citing these same letters as "manuscripts", but encountered other problems (which I can detail if any of you is interested). I have also tried to edit and add my own CSL Style version of the Chicago Manual, with corrections for these three specific points, but I failed to understand where the "letter" category was in order to fix it.
Any ideas as to how to proceed?
Thank you!
1. When the letter is first fully cited, there is no option for citing the place (where the letter was sent from / to).
More importantly, when the same letter is cited again in the same text, the shortened version has several major problems:
2. the shortened citation only mentions the family name of author and recipient. This is especially a problem when working with family letters, as all involved have the same family name, with no way to distinguish between them.
3. the shortened citation doesn't mention the date of the specific letter. This is a problem when dealing with more than one letter from the same author to the same recipient, as there is no way to distinguish between several letters.
I have tried citing these same letters as "manuscripts", but encountered other problems (which I can detail if any of you is interested). I have also tried to edit and add my own CSL Style version of the Chicago Manual, with corrections for these three specific points, but I failed to understand where the "letter" category was in order to fix it.
Any ideas as to how to proceed?
Thank you!
(if you want to fix this yourself, see the mapping here: https://aurimasv.github.io/z2csl/typeMap.xml letters are personal_communication in CSL)
Yes, I do have a sample citation for 1. I would like the full citation to be:
Terry, Sarah to Amelia Terry, August 25, 1843, Malta to London, Mss Eur C250, British Library Archive.
And the shortened version:
Terry, Sarah to Amelia, August 25, 1843.
I know the Chicago manual doesn't include this info, but as I am working on delivery
routes, I find it important.
And thank you for the link, we now understand were the letter part is. We have tried to change it, but we got the impression that the Chicago Manual style is a dependent style, and the changes should be done elsewhere. Is this incorrect?
Do you know how we can change these parameters? Specifically, how can we add a place, and how can we make sure the date is included in the short citation?
Re> "And thank you for the link, we now understand were the letter part is. We have tried to change it, but we got the impression that the Chicago Manual style is a dependent style, and the changes should be done elsewhere. Is this incorrect? "
that is not correct.
Chicago is probably the most elaborate and well-revised style there is on the repository. That's 1400 lines of code. See here: https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/chicago-fullnote-bibliography.csl
A dependent style would be about 16 lines and looks like this:
https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/blob/master/dependent/constellations.csl
"Specifically, how can we add a place, and how can we make sure the date is included in the short citation?"
I don't see how this question was resolved?
publisher-place: Malta to London
and then customizing the style accordingly, but the latter won't be trivial for Chicago Manual
The date should be added I agree. But in general, the best solution for a researcher who works, say, on family correspondence where from/to places and first names are important, should just make his own style based on Chicago and use that. There is no way to account for all variations of archival citations in Chicago unfortunately.