rewrite note: February 2020 – some motivation!
A short little update, folks, because I started thinking about this and wanted to get it out of my system in a way that would actually be profitable—
I’m working with my existing library tonight, which is in BibTeX. Unfortunately, tonight I’m trying to add a translation to the library (Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, if you’re curious). The pain point: BibTeX and BibLaTeX only sort of understand the idea of translations. The tooling is extremely extensible—because everything around LaTeX is hyper-extensible—but it isn’t very usable.
By contrast, when I open EndNote, I have all the options in the world… and figuring out how to extend things if I need to extend the options that are already set is still beyond me. Poke around as I may, it’s not obvious at all where I might add more information to the “Book” type. Zotero is, similarly, relatively friendly but not especially easy to modify or extend.
The problem, of course, is that managing both out-of-the-box usability and extensibility is very difficult. In truth I don’t yet have a good solution for this. I’ve spent the last few weeks iterating slowly but steadily on the web implementation (and I’m pleased with the progress I’ve made!), but niggling at the back of my mind is the reality that some of these hard problems are just going to require dozens of iterations at a minimum to get anywhere remotely like where I actually want to be.
None of these make for very good note-taking tools, either. Zotero supports attaching notes to references, and EndNote has fields built in for “Notes” and “Research Notes” (why the two separately? I couldn’t say), but neither are remotely the kind of thing I need when building out a detailed perspective on a book or a journal article or anything else. Not least because they’re totally un-integrated with the rest of my research!
The net of all of this: Anytime I actually start doing serious research—as I am at the moment for both a Sunday School class on theological anthropology I’ll be teaching at the end of the summer, and for the Winning Slowly Season 8 book club—I hit these pain points and get that much more motivated to keep digging in. I’m going to finish adding these citations to my library, and then I’m going to go hammer at the Elm web app. This project is massive, but I remain motivated to keep making progress. Steady on.