Quotes & Religious Texts

ransomca
Hi,
I'd like Zotero to have items for "Quotes" and "Religious Texts." Or some way to make custom items. Sometimes you want to capture just a snippet that someone has said, and many people collect quotes that they use later in their writing. Usually, the quote doesn't need extensive bibliographic information beyond who said it and the date and location, but I can see how it might be useful to have more than that if you were collecting bits of information from a particular source before you'd made your own notes on it and want to distinguish it from your notes.

Secondly, people who study religions need a special item for Sacred Religious Texts. These would have the book/chapter and verse designations, instead of necessarily page numbers. Also the publication information is not as important. These fields would have to be flexible of course to accommodate the structure of a multitude of religious textual formats and not tied to a particular religion's interface.

Thanks,
Callista
  • bdarcus
    people who study religions need a special item for Sacred Religious Texts. These would have the book/chapter and verse designations, instead of necessarily page numbers. Also the publication information is not as important.
    First, the caveat I don't speak for Zotero, but do work with them on some details that have bearing on this issue.

    Can you clarify details here? When you say you want to include chapter and verse information, where do you want to include that? In the citation, to indicate a particular stretch of text you are referring to? Or are you meaning to have different records for different sections, and hence in the database record need to store that information?
    These fields would have to be flexible of course to accommodate the structure of a multitude of religious textual formats and not tied to a particular religion's interface.
    In general, everything needs to be as general as possible for things to work reliably across data entry, import/export and citation formatting.

    I personally think custom fields is a bad idea because then -- I believe -- things start to break (e.g. citations don't format correctly, import/export across applications doesn't work, etc.).

    So my questions here are trying to get a better sense of the big view. What "fields" need to be "flexible"? In what ways? For what purposes?
  • ransomca
    Hi,
    Thanks for responding. I'm not thinking about anything too complicated here. I think a simple modification of the book or book section item would do. For example, instead of "pages" there could be an option for "verses" instead. This could be useful if you're studying a particular verse or section of verses and want to write a note about it. As for the chapter/book idea, some religious texts, like the Bible, have for example Books, while the Qur'an has Chapters. (I am not familiar with other sacred texts.) So, for example if we're going to use "book section" as our starting point, the "title" could become the chapter or book title, and the "book title" would be the text. As the rest of the information is extra it could be left to be filled in or not.

    I am personally not in a Religious Studies department and do not know how it works in their field. I do however study my own religion on a personal level and would like to use Zotero for my own study and notes related to that area. (I use Zotero for my work already in the sciences.) For the time being, I could use the above-mentioned "book section" item for what I need, and just know that I'm using the "title" and "pages" fields differently than intended.

    I hope this clears things up for you but please let me know if you need more clarification or you think it's a dumb idea. :)

    Thanks,
    Callista
  • bdarcus
    "Book Section" is indeed what you need, the only awkwardness coming from the way the Bible uses the term "book". In that the case, the "book title" is in fact "The Bible."

    Aside from that, the only issue is more fine-grained locators like verse (and in other contexts, paragraphs maybe).

    But, you could of course store that information for now in the "extra" field.
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