Is a way to export a Zotero 5.x library in a way that can be opened by Zotero 4.x?

Zotero 5.0 has been a fantastic improvement over 4.0 for people (like me) who work with large (mostly full-text) Zotero personal and group libraries. Thanks to the team for that. Also most plugins that I use regularly have now been updated to the 5.x branch, which is also great. But there is one that is no longer working and that I found uniquely valuable to (automatically) discover the main topics in a large Zotero library - paper machines (PM). PM no longer works on 5.0. The developer, Cora Johnson-Roberson, did write a Zotero plugin to export Zotero libraries to another textmining tool (Voyant), but that plugin also no longer works.

So I am so desperate to regain that now missing textmining functionality that I'd be willing to re-install the old 4.0 with an old version of firefox - just to get that functionality back. My question to this community: what would be the best way for me to go about that? Can I export my 5.0 library in a format (rdf?) that would allow me to re-import it (in another data folder of course) in Zotero 4.0. Could I run both versions (4.0 and 5.0) in different Firefox profiles  and from different data folders alongside each other? Are there any other issues that I may be ignoring/underestimating? 

Thanks for any guidance that any of you could provide me with on this!

  • you can export/import Zotero RDF, yes. It't not 100% loss-less, but it's very close.

    I don't know about running 4 and 5 in parallel. I think it might be possible, but not sure. You should be aware that having 4 running on your computer while it is connected to the internet will become a security issue in the near future.
  • What exactly are you looking for in terms of text mining?
  • edited August 22, 2018
    :) Where do I start? Topic modelling, n-gram co-occurrence, named entity extraction, event extraction, sentiment extraction, causality extraction, temporality extraction, concept mapping, geotagging, etc. etc. I'd like to be able to hook up the entire suite of currently available (open source) textmining tools to any of the (many, many) text corpora we now have in Zotero for their initial exploratory analysis. As (I would think) every single scholar would...
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