Saturday, March 13th, 2010. tags: bibliography, citations, tags, zotero
zotero is a wonderful, life saving bibliographic and note-taking tool.
i can emphasize that as much as possible, or you can check it out for yourself, install it in everyone’s favorite open source browser, and see how much it changes your citation life. with the VUE addon, you can also become a newfangled levi strauss.
there are limits, however, to what zotero is able to currently do with its tagging features, which is where i got interested while preparing my bibliographies recently. with a tool like the zotero report customizer as my inspiration, i tried my hand at generating a list of tags that i could then build into a tag cloud.
first, you have to export your tags into something useful. zotero runs on sqllite, a sql-based, but local running, database engine. download a client (either at the sqlite page or google’s tool (though i found the command line version to be better) and get a list of your tags exported with something like:
SELECT name, COUNT(*) AS count FROM itemTags NATURAL JOIN tags WHERE libraryID IS NULL GROUP BY name
you’ll get something that looks like this (but less jargony?):
"""world music""",5
3rd-world-ism,4
abandonment,3
abolition,2
abstraction,1
to be continued shortly i promise as i set this blog up
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010.
welcome to my new site, visitors.
this site has evolved through the years as many things, first as just a way to stake out my name – and keep it from becoming some spam site for other users. of course this domain hangs over you like a dark cloud, just begging you to do something with it, so after much hemming and hawing it’s going to stay like this for a while.
i’m an anthropologist, to be sure, interested in intellectual property and digital worlds. I’ve just finished the coursework process (ABD, yo!) at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and thanks to some helpful grant monies from the powers that be, am starting coursework in Brazil to investigate anthropological questions of IP and the so-called “Black Atlantic,” as well as how Brazil is working with other emerging powers to redefine (or sadly, remain defined by) traditional copyright law.
stay tuned to the blog, because I do intend to make it a “collaborative” one insofar as – bucking the trendiness of it all – I can actually post words, video and music from informants in the hopes that their ideas gain traction on the interwebs directly as their own, rather than filtered through the anthropologist’s words.
incidentally, i stumbled across some old letters i sent when i had digitale magazine up and running in 199-freaking-5(!11!). it was a state of the art online web magazine. if i had kept it up and actually bought domains at the time, i would be a rich man. sigh. here are some of the letters for your enjoyment:
Hello! I am Jon Reinberg, owner and editor of the World Wide Web
computer games magazine, Digitale. We review the latest breakthroughs
in the world of computers and computer games. Some of the products we
have reviewed are:
* Phylon Playlink 2000: The first ever gaming DSVD modem
* Virtual I/O and VFX/1: Excellent Virtual Reality goggles for the PC
* Mortal Kombat 3 – Regarded as the best PC fighter _ever_
I am requesting an evaluation unit of the Diamond Edge for Digitale.
We will review it, and place a link to Diamond Multimedia’s web site
at the bottom. Also, we usually keep our units permanently in our
computers to test them with new games that come out. If this message
has reached the wrong person, please forward it to the correct person.
Digitale is available at: http://www.happypuppy.com/digitale/digitale.html [ed note: does not work, sadly!]
Digitale Magazine
REDACTED
Please feel free to contact me with questions and comments.
Sincerely,
Jon Reinberg
Digitale Owner and Editor