Roland Barthes meets Jorge Luis Borges: Zotero Strategies and Open Office

aaronwilcher
Dear Zoteroastrians:

It'd be great to have a forums about strategies for developing Zotero catalogs in the disciplines. I teach American history and would like to develop what I can "dynamic syllabi" around Zotero: multimedia references for all course materials: bibliographic references, images used in side presentations, lecture notes.

Also, as a student and teacher of visual culture, it is not clear how to reference non-textual material (I'm referring especially to Roland Barthes meditations on the subject in his "Image, Music, Text," for example.) I'd be curious how others are planning on integrating images into their Zotero catalogs. The images can be attached to a bilbiographic reference of a book for example, but it can also stand on its own. Anyway, my specific issue right now is creating these "dynamic syllabi" "dynamic lesson plans."

On THAT note, a request would be not only to integrate Zotero with Mirosoft Word and other commercial writing programs, but also ESPECIALLY with Sun's OpenOffice. I teach at community college, and many of my students cannot afford to buy software (or just won't do it.)

regards,

Aaron Wilcher, Mountain View, CA
  • bdarcus
    I mentioned this on another topic, but Zotero needs some clear generic default types: Document, Communication, and for this case, Image. It looks silly to have types like "Forum Post" and "instant Message" when it doesn't even have the core fallbacks.
  • aaronwilcher
    I think I can get around it, but still, a button under the green + sign listing "Image" or "photograph" might be helpful. For now, "artwork" seems like the closest thing. Still, I'd like to hear what others are going to do with their image libraries. Is there a good way to make references out of the visual, as Barthes famously worried about the connotative and denotative aspects of non-textual material, placing captions next to images, for example (Image Music Text and Camera Lucida).

    Have people used other programs to catalog images? I tried to do so with EndNote a couple years ago, spent a lot of time, and created a real clunker. Zotero seems far more promising.
  • bdarcus
    Sort of a related aside; I just had a tough question from a student wanting to cite a documentary film for a paper. The documentary was an independent film released as bonus content on a DVD. So an AV item contained in another AV item.

    This is exactly the sort of relational stuff that makes apps like Endnote choke.

    On images, if you need to use them for citations, then Zotero ought to handle them. But there are of course dedciated image cataloguing apps.

    I agree: Zotero needs "Image" as a subclass of "Document." "Artwork" is maybe a little confusing; too broad (it a play art?) and too narrow (misses diagrams and such) at the same time?
  • leeadc
    Has this been resolved? I am working on a digital history project and we are using zotero as the research organizer. however, the lack of an image/photograph designation is very limiting

    HELP!
  • ajlyon
    What are you missing in the Artwork item type? Please try not to assign much value to the name of the type-- what can't you do with the current type(s)?
  • casehouse8
    I don't know if this is the right place for my input on this issue, but it would be great if Zotero could work together with Lightroom and/or Extensis Portfolio. As an art historian, it would be so helpful if my images could be organized/indexed right along with my text sources. If, for example, I had scanned images from a particular book, I could link those .jpgs with a source in Zotero, but somehow also to the image files in Lightroom or Portfolio. I'm still in the beginning stages of thinking about this...it just seems that Zotero is so good at bringing together a variety of types of sources/info, and that it's image organization/citation functions could possibly be more robust.
  • adamsmith
    I'm not sure how exactly lightroom and portfolio work, but I don't really see a reason why you can't do that? I use Picasa for archive photographies and its certainly possible to link an image to Picasa and Zotero at the same time - either by linking it to a Zotero item or by pointing Picasa to its storage location in Zotero.

    If you want tighter data integration, I don't think that's going to happen with proprietary software.
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