EndNote Alternative

I've been a fan of EndNote since I discovered it about 3/4 of the way through my undergraduate career. It's a great tool to keep all your notes about a particular project or all the research you've ever conducted in one place. That it can help you build bibliographies is just icing on the cake, in my opinion. Oh, and for those of you who don't know, you can download EndNote for free from Emory's software servers.

I just discovered a new Firefox-based alternative to EndNote, however: Zotero. It serves most of the functions of EndNote, except that it works within your browser and can automatically create records from many of the pages you're looking at (like the Emory Library Catalog or subscription databases like JSTOR). You can also export your bibliographies into documents.

The next version of the software will allow you to share files/references with others/groups of scholars and even use RSS feeds to get the latest information that, say, the Nineteenth-Century Fiction Association might want to make available to its members.

This looks like a really interesting tool. You can watch a video tour of it here. It's a project supported by, among others, the Mellon Foundation, so you can trust its credentials in that sense.

At the moment I see two drawbacks:

1. Firefox only
2. It's based in the browser and NOT in an online account. What this means is that if I use a computer at Emory for my library, it won't be on my computer at home. Of course, it's very easy to export the files. But it would be nice if you could log in to your Zotero account on matter where you were on earth.

Still, this is a good sign of technology to come to help us become more effective researchers.

The future of archives

Matthew Kirschenbaum (whose new book sounds pretty interesting) has an excellent article in the Chronicle Review about what the digital composition of texts will means to literary studies in the future. One important point that Krischenbaum makes is that literary scholars need to understand the issues of digital preservation in order to play a role in the creation of archives.

Google books map feature

Thanks to "Savage Minds," the anthropology blog, I've just come across the new feature of Google books that maps the locations mentioned in the text. Here's the post, and here's a sample map. You hit "about this book" and then scroll down to the bottom of the page. For instance, scroll down on this page to see the map of Hardt and Negri's Empire.

I wonder if anyone has yet noticed that this dovetails nicely with the work that Franco Moretti outlines in his Maps, Graphs, Trees -- a book that I recommend to anyone who wants to think about how technology might change the study of literature in a fundamental way. In fact, Google Books maps Moretti's book. (Let's face it, one reason that I like Moretti's book is that it gives a lot people fits.)

For now, though, this mapping feature of Google Books doesn't yet extend to fiction (as far as I can tell).