A Historian’s Toolbox – Zotero

Posted on August 17, 2017 by Quentin Holbert

Historian’s Toolkit – Zotero

A common question I hear is what reference management software is right for you. There is no single correct answer since different programs have different merits, but I wanted to offer my take on the program I use most often: Zotero.  What are my thoughts on the program? Since I use it, I must adore it! Well sort of. I like the program a lot, and it has a lot of strengths, but it has weaknesses too. I will break the program down into several key categories, and let you decide. For this commentary, my comments specifically apply to Zotero 5.0, although some of them may apply to earlier versions.

Primary Rundown

As of August 2017, Zotero is a two-piece program: the standalone application, and the browser’s connector. The application is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. The application is the part of the program that you add references manually or from other databases, organize them, modify them, or export them. The citation capture tool is available in Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari, and is the main way that you import new references. There is also a bookmark tool that you can add to these browsers and to mobile-based browsers to save web pages to your library. All you have to do is open the source’s web page, and click on the Zotero icon in your extensions toolbar. These two tools connect through your free Zotero account. All you have to do is log in through the preferences in both the browser and the standalone application, and click “sync” within the application’s “Preference” section. With this setup, it is entirely possible to import your references from online databases with one computer and have them automatically update the standalone application on another computer. To add citations to your word program, be it Microsoft Word or Libre/Open writer, you need to install Zotero’s plugin for each program. You can install this plugin through the standalone application, or you can download the plugin manually from Zotero’s “Download” page.

System Compatibility

I often switch between Windows and Linux work environments, and cross-compatibility is essential for my core software. Zotero fills this niche in that it runs natively on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. Furthermore, the citation capture tool is available in Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari. Zotero’s broad browser compatibility makes keeping my database updated on any computer very easy. That said compatibility does not extend to writing programs. As of this article’s publication in August 2017, only Microsoft Word, and Open/Libre Writer is formally supported. Programs like LaTeX and Scrivener do not have first-party support, which substantially limits Zotero’s viability for different users. Luckily third-party plugins are available at https://www.zotero.org/support/plugins for other programs, although I cannot attest to these plugins’ reliability as I have not recently used many of them. Furthermore switching between the supported work programs is not perfect, although this is more related to different coding in these programs rather than with Zotero. For in-text citations as often used in APA or MLA, you’re safe to switch between Microsoft Word and Open/Libre Writer. If you use a footnote or endnote based citation style, however, you will not be able to switch between the different programs cleanly. What will happen is that all of your references will convert into plain-text entries, and you will have to re-add them manually for the Zotero plugin to recognize them. To mitigate this issue, work within only one writing program from start to finish.

Managing Your Library

The three ways of importing data are with the web citation tool, manually creating an entry, and importing previous databases. The Web Citation tool can grab documents from academic and library databases with ease, often offering multiple import options and listing all the documents available for import. Once you move outside these realms, however, your quality varies heavily on if the web page in question Zotero reads different web pages. I commonly find that on news websites, it does not always catalog the author or publisher of the various articles. Sometimes you will also get information, such as the ISBN or DOI, when publishers or supervisor prefers that it remains absent, which means that you must manually remove these values in the standalone application, or modify the citation template. Archives such as the Imperial War Museum are not always optimized for Zotero either, and you still must manually add the entry.

The manual addition is, thankfully, straightforward. You select the type of sources that you are citing, such as book or document, and input the information. I love the control and ease of adding references, especially for multi-author books. You can define different creator roles, which is useful for citing specific chapters from one in a compilation piece. The only downside that I encountered with manual addition is that sometimes it is ambiguous which category your reference fits under, so you should experiment to see what looks the closest to what you need.

Finally, you can import previously-existing databases. You will likely only use this process if you are transferring data from other programs into your Zotero library, and it works well enough the last I tested it with an Endnote library. Since I mostly use the other two tools, I cannot comment on how well the program reads different databases from various programs.

Collaboration

When collaborating with other users, the difficulty of synchronizing documents varies heavily on what citation software different people use. If everybody uses Zotero, it is straightforward: you create a group in the application, invite other users, and then you can share a set of references. The ease of use makes transferring documents back and forth very easy since, rather than referencing multiple libraries, it is technically only referencing one library. Importing citations from other programs is also easy. Zotero can, by default, read databases created in other applications and convert it to its format. While it adds a few extra steps compared to a simple Zotero setup, it can work well. The easiest way to convert from Zotero to other formats is to export the library as an RIS file, which other citation management software can read without too much trouble.

Stability

I have not had any crashes or loss of data from errors since I started using the program in mid-2015, but that anecdote is insufficient to describe the program’s stability or CPU use.  As of writing this, the developers were in the middle of updating the system requirements page for Zotero 5.0. The only information available at the time were the operating system requirements, which are as follows:

*macOS 10.9 or later 1)

*Windows XP SP2 or later

*Linux

I decided to run a test to see how what the program demanded out of its users. For Windows 7, I decided to use the provided resource monitor to track how much RAM and CPU Zotero required. In a clean install of the program and with the process set to a “Normal” priority, the operating system dedicated 176,000 Kilobytes of RAM to the process, with it actively consuming between 80,000 and 100,000 Kilobytes at any given time. The CPU usage was negligible except for when the program was actively updating its database. The average CPU usage was 0.14% of available resources on a machine running an Intel i5-4570 processor (3.2 GHz, quad core).

What does this mean for average usability? Any modern computer with at least 2 gigabytes of RAM should run Zotero conjoint with a word processor and browser, although I would personally recommend 4 Gigabytes of RAM to run all three processes with no slowdown. I also expect that a dual core with at least 2 GHz of RAM would have no problem with all three methods, although I recommend at least a dual core with 2.5 GHz or any quad core. Most stock laptops and desktops should, therefore, run the program with a browser and a word processing program with no issues.

Community Support

Zotero benefits from an active community of researchers across disciplines, and the developers take full advantage of this. One function that I find useful is that there is a user repository of citation style templates available for free download, which encompasses everything from loose variations of standard styles like Chicago to journal-specific styles. Still nothing quite like what you’re looking for? There are official guides on how to edit a  template manually on Zotero’s website. A good place to start is at https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/style_editing_step-by-step. One example of this is that I commonly use Chicago Manual of Style with full notes, but no Ibid., which is not available in the default settings.

Conclusion

Is Zotero right for you? I like it a lot, but I can see where it falls short. It does not work the best in settings where software such as LaTeX is the primary tool, and it does have some cross-program compatibility issues that software like Endnotes does not have. Nonetheless, I like it for its stability, ease of use across multiple computers, and its active community. I would recommend trying the program with a smaller course paper before committing to a full project. For me, it is my primary program for the foreseeable future.

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Newspaper Article Abstract – Why Newfoundland and Labrador Always Remembers

Posted on August 4, 2017 by Quentin Holbert

Full Article: http://www.cbncompass.ca/opinion/2016/11/10/why-newfoundland-and-labrador-always-remembers.html

The First World War was deserving of its title as “The Great War.” This was the first time industrial warfare swept across a global scale.

Soldiers and civilians alike perished across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East as millions more from the Americas and Oceania wept for their fallen. This was also the first war that Newfoundland participated in as a Dominion rather than a colony. The outbreak of war in 1914 offered an opportunity for Newfoundlanders to distinguish themselves as fiercely loyal to Great Britain.

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Book Review Abstract – Giacomo Macola, The Gun in Central Africa: A History of Technology and Politics.

Posted on August 4, 2017 by Quentin Holbert

The full version of this review is available in African Studies Quarterly.

One rich element of modern colonial histories is that they acknowledge the nuance with how colonialism affected different nations. Giacomo Macola successfully crafted what he declared as “the first detailed history of firearms in central Africa between the early nineteenth and the early twentieth century” (p. 19), which is an example of applying nuance to a basic idea: what happened when guns were introduced to Central Africa on a cultural level? This comprehensive examination of guns’ social symbolism is conjoint with a broader history of firearms in the region, which encompasses the early introduction of guns to gun regulation in the 1920s across dozens of different nations.

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Book Review Abstract – Graham A. Dominy, Last outpost on the Zulu Frontier: Fort Napier and the British Imperial Garrison

Posted on August 3, 2017 by Quentin Holbert

This review is available in full in Africa Trends.

From the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank to Ethiopia’s occupation of Eritrean Badme, territorial disputes are still a source of tension for many nations. There is a strong body of literature that discusses the different economic and diplomatic implications of occupation like Azoulay Adi Ophir Ariella’s The One State Condition Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine, Walter M. Hudson’s Army Diplomacy: American Military Occupation and Foreign Policy After World War II (2015), and Margaret Pawley’s Watch on the Rhine: The Military Occupation of the Rhineland (2007). Some other works, like Keat Gin Ooi’s The Japanese Occupation of Borneo, 1941-1945 (2011) and Peter M. R. Stirk’s The Politics of Military Occupation (2009) provide excellent insights into the logistics of military occupations. One gap in the current dialogue, however, is regarding the consequence of long-term military occupation on local civilian populations.

Graham A. Dominy’s Last Outpost on the Zulu Frontier: Fort Napier and the British Imperial Garrison (2016) addresses this gap through a thorough case study of Fort Napier’s social influences on South Africa. Fort Napier overlooked the colonial capital of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa from 1843 to 1914. The original intent of this garrison was to “bolster the prestige of the colonial state” (p. 44) to mask British weakness in South Africa rather than actually securing the region strategically. During the fort’s seventy-one year history, the garrison “took part in active campaigning on four occasions, totalling less than four years” (p. 2). The fort’s history expands beyond the garrison’s involvement in the campaigns. Dominy argues that “(G)arrison activities were integral to the wider social and cultural life of settler society, but they also played a noteworthy role in the refashioning of African society during the mid to late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century” (p. 108). Dominy particularly emphasises the importation of Victorian ideals into South Africa.

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Book Review Abstract – Jasen J. Castillo, Endurance and War: The National Sources of Military Cohesion.

Posted on September 21, 2016 by Quentin Holbert

 This review is available in full in the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies.

Since the earliest thinkers of ancient Greece and China, theorists have speculated about the nature of warfare; what drives men to war, what determines victory, and what are the implications of victory or defeat? Theorists from Sun Tzu to Carl Von Clausewitz all offered theories about the conduct of warfare with changing political and technological environments.

Jasen J. Castillo offers his piece, Endurance and War: The National Sources of Military Cohesion, to the millennia-long dialogue and proposes his theories on how armies stay cohesive when facing dire situations. Endurance and War: The National Sources of Military Cohesion focuses on theoretical components of military conduct rather than the actions of militaries. Therefore this book is more comparable to works such as Michael Farrell’s theoretical piece Modern Just War Theory: A Guide to Research than conventional histories such as Gordan Corrigan’s The Second World War: A Military History. Castillo argues that we can explain how militaries fight in suboptimal conditions using a few models of combat cohesion. Castillo’s models of combat cohesion emphasize two positive correlations: a positive correlation between the military’s organizational autonomy and their combat ability, and a positive correlation between a regime’s control over its population and the degree of cohesion within their military. The independent variables, which are regime control and organizational autonomy, affect their respective dependent variables, which are combat cohesion and combat effectiveness respectively. Castillo highlights these relationships with five case studies: Germany from 1944-1945, France in 1940, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1941, North Vietnam from 1965-1973, and the United States of America (USA) from 1968-1972.

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Book Review Abstract – Jeremy Black, War in the Modern World, 1990-2014

Posted on September 21, 2016 by Quentin Holbert

This review is available in full in Canadian Military History.

Despite the immense tension between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War, the period was ultimately defined as a delicate balancing act between major powers. Cold War conflicts were proxy wars that served as a balancing measure between the two major powers. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 created a power vacuum that the United States alone was not able to fill. The 1990s thus represent a period of major transition and reassessment for major military forces, and of conflicts that took advantage of the newly-formed vacuum.

In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a tremendous body of literature on the Cold War period has been written. Of particular emphasis in this literature is the United Nation’s shift towards peacekeeping operations and different military alliances, such as NATO focus on anti-insurgency measures. British military historian Jeremy Black’s War in the Modern World, 1990-2014 offers unique insight into the differing conflicts that have emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Black’s work relies upon the central premise that war in a post-Soviet environment is an inevitable byproduct of a collapsing power. He strongly emphasizes that war is a fundamental part of modernity, and that different conflicts arise as a response to the power vacuum left by the Soviet collapse. The conflicts that arose in the 1990s and 2000s were products of continuing advancements among different nations; advancements, which, in part, were responses to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Black also examines how the actions of individual groups such as Boko Haram and Jabhat Al Nusra, which are Islamic extremists groups that operate in Nigeria and Syria respectively, are responses to localised conditions, and the greater implications of these groups’ actions. Such groups appear in response to new instabilities, and play a role in defining modern stability.

 

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