I’ve been working with Zotero for several years, and I’d like to guide interested participants through the Zotero ecosystem as it currently exists, but more vitally, I’m interested in working to find new ways for people to mash Zotero’s many-faceted world up with other tools, from annotation to textual analysis to archival research to writing tools, to whatever you bring to the table.
As I understand it, the beauty of Zotero is its capacity for extension and growth, and I would love to share what can be done by ambitious and creative people. My own small experience started by extending and maintaining the translator library that maintains compatibility between Zotero and web sites, import formats, and search engines, and proceeded to include the development of a Zotero mobile client for Android. This has all been a thrilling experience, yet the extant documentation isn’t really sufficient to get a good foot in the door of the deeper Zotero world and I believe a session, a couple of hours with interested minds and some mild expertise, would do much to spur new and unexpected new developments.
The concrete content of the session will necessarily depend on the desires of the participants, but I’m hoping to steer the discussion away from the basics of setting up accounts, formatting references, and the like, so that we can devote time to the more arcane and possibly transformative elements of the Zotero project.
Resources
- Zotero itself, www.zotero.org/
- Contribution to Zotero, www.zotero.org/getinvolved/. The plugin, translator, and API information is particularly relevant.
- API implementations, www.zotero.org/support/dev/server_api. There are open-source API implementations in Python, PHP, JavaScript, Obj-C/iOS, and Java/Android.
- Zotpress, wordpress.org/extend/plugins/zotpress/. A WordPress plugin that neatly demonstrates the potential of using the Zotero API in new places.
I would also be more than happy to offer an introductory workshop on either site translator development (i.e., making sites work with Zotero and Zotero work with sites; www.zotero.org/support/dev/translators) or basic API usage (i.e., making Zotero data show up in program/place X). Please let me know in the comments or on Twitter (@ajlyon) if people have any interest in such introductory workshops
4 comments
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Amanda French
August 9, 2012 at 7:35 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
I for one am super-psyched for this — you’ve helped me out on the forums more than once, ajlyon (if that IS your real name) and I’d really love to get into transformative uses of Zotero.
Colleen Greene
August 20, 2012 at 9:28 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
All of those workshop ideas sound great! I think a considerable number of Campers will want and be ready for these types of workshops.
We do also have a large number of Campers though that aren’t familiar with Zotero at all — so, perhaps we can wrangle up another Zotero-experienced Camper to teach an Intro workshop as well. I’d wager that a number of the public heritage community who are attending will need to see/hear *why* they should make their sites work with Zotero — what’s the advantage.
Thanks for stepping up, ajlyon1!
Avram Lyon
August 21, 2012 at 10:00 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
I would be glad to do more on the technical things that people are interested in– from the Twitter traffic, that might include versioning (git/github), Zotero topics of all sorts. Glad to be a resource for interested people, in whatever form is appropriate for THATCamp.
angshah
August 21, 2012 at 12:26 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
This sounds great and would be super useful for me.