sharing bibliographies (via zotero)

Recently I was speaking with a scholar-friend about a new “Pacific Worlds” project that I’m working on.  As I outlined where I was in my research process, he remarked that one of the most time-consuming elements of starting a new project, is assembling a list of seminal works in the field, and ensuring that you’ve read each of them and understand how they’re in conversation with each other.

In that vein, I thought about how much time I spend “mining” the bibliographies of other scholars to gather the relevant readings for my own work. Doing this is time-consuming, particularly if one is hand-entering the relevant data into a spreadsheet or bibliography database. Using a resource like zotero allows us to bypass some of that searching/data-entry process, but that only really works if other scholars in your field are also on zotero and are sharing their research folders (i.e. it’s pretty unlikely if you’re in any field outside of the digital humanities).

So, I decided that I would jump in and share the resources that I’ve compiled thus far with this new project.  To do so, I added the “ZotPress” plugin for WordPress to this site.  As I type this, my zotero library is being imported into my WordPress install:

It’s taking some time–my zotero library is pretty sizable.

And now, just a few minutes later, I have a webpage of my growing bibliography for this new project.  ZotPress allows you to insert a shortcode to display the citation data from a zotero folder or from any number of other parameters (author, category, etc).  And you can also choose from a variety of citation styles to display your data.

Voila!