#Scrivener zotero archive
#Scrivener zotero pro
#Scrivener zotero trial

To make research copies of DVDs, I use Handbrake. IвЂ™m a cultural historian who works a lot with film, so my workflow has to be able to accommodate video as well as any number of other artifacts: photographs, three-dimensional objects, oral histories.

DEVONthink allows me to retrieve and preview all kinds of media in situ. My tools of choice for capturing archival finds are a digital camera, a tripod, and (as IвЂ™ve written elsewhere) Automator, Acrobat Pro, and Zotero.

#Scrivener zotero archive

ItвЂ™s rare that I write something without doing original research in some archive somewhere. And my transcription habit makes it easy to search for and drop in relevant quotes as I write. ZoteroвЂ™s notes feature is a great place to record important quotes, since it keeps the quotes tied to the works they come from. IвЂ™m a fast typist and the effort of entering the quote keeps me focused on the page in front of me. One technique IвЂ™ve developed to keep my mind focused is to transcribe important quotes as I read. IвЂ™ve never been great at concentrating single-mindedly on a complicated work. When I'm reading something complicated, like Judith Butler's Bodies that Matter, I tend to write down a lot of what I read. Now that IвЂ™ve acknowledged these hard truths about myself, IвЂ™ve turned to tools that automate this process by grabbing good metadata, batch-editing file names and formats, and optimizing files for searchability: Zotero, Automator, and DEVONthink. I also wonвЂ™t diligently create consistent filenames or enter proper metadata for my files. For example, it would be nice to maintain nested hierarchical folder trees, but in real life, I wonвЂ™t do that. For me, the breaking point comes when thereвЂ™s too high a burden of manually recording and organizing data. IвЂ™ve experimented with a lot of organizational schemes. IвЂ™m not particularly disciplined about organizing my files. Even better, I can reuse my notes for multiple works - a simple thing, but something I havenвЂ™t been able to do in the past because IвЂ™m too disorganized. And I can easily find the idea again using ZoteroвЂ™s search feature. ZoteroвЂ™s note fields allow me to take notes on one source and then quickly move on to the next one, without disrupting the flow of my ideas. When IвЂ™m on the trail of a research problem, I jump from source to source quickly and unpredictably as ideas occur to me. They start with one work, read all the way through it, and move on to the next. Some people, IвЂ™ve noticed, read in a much more sustained way than I do. IвЂ™m an erratic reader and have a short attention span. ItвЂ™s fast, I can access it on multiple computers, it works with my browser, and it can handle pretty much any source. So itвЂ™s important that IвЂ™m capturing references as I go, with a reference manager that can quickly and thoroughly grab the information I need from any source. This is a sprawling, idiosyncratic process that takes me unpredictably from Academic Search Premier to Google Scholar to physical books to Wikipedia. I hunt for the most recent, comprehensive relevant source I can find and citation-chain from one work to another. In general, the first thing I do when approaching a research topic is to survey it in the secondary literature. I generally start a new Zotero folder when I get interested in a new research topic.

#Scrivener zotero trial

I havenвЂ™t used DEVONthink much in the past, but after giving it a more concentrated trial for my last post, I suspect it will make its way into my workflow, too. Keynote, SlideShare, and WordPress for sharing work.

#Scrivener zotero pro

Automator and Acrobat Pro for processing photographs I take in archives.Zotero for collecting and organizing sources (both primary and secondary), taking notes, and citing sources.

IвЂ™d also really love to hear what you use and why! I do indeed have a number of favored tools, and since I find myself endlessly fascinating, I enjoyed the chance to consider why I use them and what it says about me as a researcher. Still, after I wrote the post, a few people asked me which tools I use.

IвЂ™ve tried and failed to foist my favorite tools on enough people to know that this is true. I posted recen tlyВ about tools for managing a research workflow, and one of the points I made is that no set of tools will be right for everyone.