In my con­tinu­ing effort to dir­ect you away from my blog, I am com­pelled to note Bill Turkel’s follow-up to a post I ref­er­enced last week.zotero.jpg In this one he pon­ders our con­scious cre­ation of “islands of stasis” and why an ana­chron­istic mode of research prac­tise per­sists. More import­antly his ‘punch­line’ refers briefly to how to make use of tools, such as Zotero, effi­ciently to com­pre­hend our private research pro­cesses. He muses “that meas­ure­ments of your Zotero bib­li­o­graphy will be most use­ful to the extent that they are fed back into your research in a use­ful way.” This is very power­ful obser­va­tion and activ­ity, but also dan­ger­ous.
Zotero provides a num­ber of integ­rated func­tions to accom­plish this meas­ure­ment, most dra­mat­ic­ally through integ­ra­tion of SIMILE’s Timeline tool. You can quickly visu­al­ize the con­text of your explor­a­tion, and poten­tially dis­cover pat­terns in the return that you may have oth­er­wise missed. These can func­tion as cor­rect­ive, or open up new dir­ec­tions that you were not con­sciously explor­ing. The unfor­tu­nate pit­fall (I men­tion this as its all too real for me) is exten­ded navel gaz­ing and self-reflection attempt­ing to find a myth­ical optimal or uto­pian tool or tool set. Zotero offers an API that is access­ible and power­fully com­pel­ling. Too much reflec­tion of the pro­cess can be a bad thing, but none at all is a far greater threat to suc­cess.
Turkel’s real­iz­a­tions are hon­est and pres­ci­ent, but I expect sus­pect in many circles. The real­ity is that many tech­niques that he iden­ti­fies are not right for all and how one does research is a very indi­vidual act. Increas­ingly how­ever, the indi­vidual act is drawn into the col­lect­ive in rad­ical new ways that reflect a broad reappraisal of why we do what we do. Ask­ing that big ques­tion is always a dan­ger­ous, but neces­sary act.