HPCwire: The Next Big Thing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science Computing: Zotero

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July 09, 2008

The Next Big Thing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science Computing: Zotero

by Kevin D. Franklin and Karen Rodriguez'G, ICHASS

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In this series of articles, Kevin D. Franklin and Karen Rodriguez'G examine computational tools and approaches at the interface of humanities, arts and social science.

Zotero: The Next Generation Research Tool

In the world of the academic researcher, how to gather, organize and recall your data has been an issue for as long as there's, well, been academic researchers. The picture of the wild-haired professor surrounded by boxes and boxes of note cards, representing years of research for his or her next monograph, is fast going the way of the dinosaur. Not the professor, but the data cataloging system.

Instead, savvy faculty, college students, lawyers, librarians, and anyone who collects and uses references are realizing the benefits of using Zotero, an innovative research collection, management and citation system. Zotero's motto -- "research not re-search" -- exemplifies the ease and facility of a system that -- among other things -- can save notes and records in 34 languages (with more on the way), integrates easily with available word processing systems (Word and OpenOffice), and has the ability to store, access and export various types of sources (images, full text, Web pages, etc.). Even better, it's free. Funded by the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Zotero is the brainchild of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University.

Daniel Cohen, a history professor at George Mason and director of CHNM, and an inaugural recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies' Digital Innovations Fellowship, is one of Zotero's developers and directors. Dr. Cohen regularly writes and teaches on the future of practicing history in a digital age, including his graduate course "Clio Wired; The Theory and Practice of Digital History," and his co-authorship of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web. The following is an interview with Dr. Cohen about the birth and future of Zotero.

What is the origin of Zotero?

Cohen: Zotero is the result of many years of thinking about the research process in a digital age at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Two forerunners of the tool at CHNM are Scribe, a free Endnote replacement created by Elena Razlogova, and Web Scrapbook, a Web application that I initially coded. Scribe managed citations and notes well; Web Scrapbook did a good job taking snapshots of Web pages, grabbing texts and images from the Web, and managing links. We were thinking of upgrading both tools a few years ago, and thought it might not be a bad idea to combine them.

Indeed, we realized, like so many others, that the Web browser had become the location for research, so it no longer made sense to have a research tool exist as a separate application, as Scribe and EndNote did; at the same time, Web Scrapbook had limitations, such as a very poor metadata schema and the necessity that a researcher log into our Web site to access their research. We also wanted something that felt like a Web application but worked offline -- say, when a historian was in an archive without wifi. In short, we wanted the best of both worlds: the best parts of client applications and Web applications.

So we envisioned a tool that lived in the browser and that was very smart about what was going on in the browser, including the recognition of scholarly metadata and objects, and that could interact with elements not only in the browser but on the desktop, such as word processors or other client-based programs, and via APIs to basic Web services and even high-performance computing services in the future. When I saw the very early versions of Firefox and recognized the power of the Mozilla extension framework to enable all of these features, the project came together.

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