Setup: Part One

One of the requirements for my Masters in English¹ was the standard scholarly research course. The major assignment of the course was to create a bibliography on a subject or author and then compose a bibliographic essay from the findings. I chose to research H. P. Lovecraft because I’d been interested in his fiction and his influence since my undergrad years.² The result of that project was a pretty extensive EndNote bibliography of Lovecraft criticism from 1990 to 2004.

Setup: Part Two

I’ve been playing with Zotero for over a year, and enjoying the improvements the Center for History and New Media folks keep cranking out for it. ³ I’ve also kept in the back of my mind the idea that I should get that Lovecraft EndNote library into Zotero, and then I should probably poke around and see if I can revise or expand it.

Converting Bibliographies

I’d had trouble with this, though, because it was a pretty large collection. My browser would freeze when attempting to import an EndNote XML file. This morning, I found bibconvert, a really handy online tool that will convert a number of bibliographic formats. I uploaded my EndNote XML and converted it to BibTex format (apparently, the preferred Zotero import format) in less than a minute. I imported the result into Zotero, also in less than a minute, and now have my entire Lovecraft bibliography in Zotero ready for tweaking, expanding, etc. Happy!

Side Note: Diigo vs. Zotero

I’ve observed the recent flood of educators switching to Diigo, and I think that’s great. It’s a really good tool with a lot of excellent features. I still use both del.icio.us and Diigo: del.icio.us for saving everything (personal, academic, professional, etc.) and Diigo for saving and annotating educational/academic pages (which are also sent to del.icio.us).

But I also use Zotero for any serious research project, and here’s why: Diigo and Zotero are not designed to do the same things. Diigo is primarily a bookmarking service, allowing users to save, annotate, tag, and organize web pages. Zotero is primarily a bibliography service, allowing users to save, annotate, tag, and organize sources, whether they are online or not. Certainly, Zotero is full of tools to make that process easier if you’re working with an online source, but you’re not limited to online sources. Also, Zotero and Diigo export their data in significantly different formats, gearing Diigo exports more for transfer between bookmarking services and Zotero exports more for transfer between bibliographic services.

Next Steps and Hopes

I still feel a bit limited with Zotero because the sources sit on my computer and can’t be easily shared with others. I certainly can’t build a collection collaboratively with others. But, as CHNM has promised, both of these limitations should be removed in the near future. Hope, hope.

These limitations aren’t solved by Diigo, either, because I can’t collaboratively build a bibliography of sources on Diigo, nor could that bibliography later be exported into a format easily adopted by scholars. I would love to see a Diigo-like ease of use and collaboration for a Zotero-like focus on bibliographies. Maybe CHNM’s plans for Zotero will deliver that or something close. Hope, hope.

Finally, I’ll be looking for some online research groups devoted to Lovecraft in the next week or so. If I don’t find any, maybe I’ll start some myself.

Resources

For anyone interested:

• My Lovecraft bibliography (currently unedited): RTF, EndNote, BibTex, Zotero
• My bibliographic essay (currently unedited): Google Doc version or CommentPress version⁴
• An admittedly bad PowerPoint that summarizes the bibliographic essay (currently unedited)

Feedback

I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone who has experience with any of these tools, or some answers/guesses to these questions:

• Anyone know about any Lovecraft-centric online research groups?
• Is my analysis of the differences between and limitations of Zotero and Diigo correct? I think it is, but maybe I’m missing something …?

Any other comments are also welcome.

Footnotes:

1. Teaching of Writing & Literature at George Mason University
2. In fact, my roommate and I used to get groups together pretty regularly to play the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. An ideal game for casual play, actually, because everyone ends up dead or insane by the end of the night. More recently, I’ve introduced my girlfriend to the Call of Cthulhu CCG, an interesting but complicated game.
3. I’m excited about their plans to add server-based syncing and group-managed collections, at which point I think Zotero will be THE go-to tool for creating, storing, and sharing annotated bibliographies.
4. If you’re into Lovecraft at all, I’d love to see some of your comments there. I setup CommentPress on a WordpressMU install just to see what it would be like. If it keeps working, the plan is to post some other shorter writings there and, perhaps, created some sub-blogs for longer works. We’ll see …