2nd August 2024 by Genevieve Clifford
One of my PhD student colleagues suggested we have a workshop for the FITLab Reading Group1 on the ways we take notes as researchers as that’s the crux of his PhD project, and we both agreed it would be useful for new PhD students and research officers, assistants, and interns. It’s definitely on the FITLab Reading Group agenda, amongst other proposals for internal (social) research training.
I thought I’d make a quick blog post about how I use Obsidian and Zotero, partly to contribute to what I’ve discussed above, but also because I use a number of devices and would appreciate a reference for myself if I have to change anything.
On the Zotero side, I make use of a plugin called Better BibTeX which works nicely with how I author documents in VS Code / LaTeX, jekyll-scholar (which I use for formatting references / bibliographies for this website)2, as well as being mandatory for the Obsidian plugin I use.
On that point, the plugin is obsidian-zotero-integration, for which I use the default settings (I don’t use tesseract, so I leave it unconfigured). I have a notes template set up based on the examples from the above linked repository, which I keep up-to-date at https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/3720833 (I can’t include this here because it interferes with Jekyll’s Liquid tags); this is kept in a Templates directory. On top of this, I prepend Cited/ to the output path, and set Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition (author-date) as the bibliography style (as I like author-date styles, and this is my favourite of those)3. Finally, I set CTRL + SHIFT + I as a keybind for this template.
When I want to insert a new note for a source, I hit CTRL + SHIFT + I4 and the Zotero Quick Format Citation window opens, I then type in information to help find the reference, and select it. The plugin then creates a new note in my Obsidian garden which I can add notes (between the %%begin notes%% and %%end notes%% comments, these are persisted between imports). Any highlights from the document will appear between the %%begin annotations%% and %%end annotations%% comments. If new highlights have been added, I just have to press CTRL + SHIFT + I again and input details of the source I’d like to update.
On sharing notes (i.e., with PhD supervisors), I use Quartz with GitLab Pages and GitLab CI/CD to build a static site version of the notes. I keep the repository and the pages it builds private, so folks that want to see it need to be added to my project (it isn’t possible to load the static site without being logged into GitLab).
This is our reading group for researchers in HCI at Swansea University (I’m a co-organiser for the group). I recently redesigned and updated the website (and got the subdomain sorted); I’m pretty happy with it! ↩
By the looks of it, there haven’t been any commits to this repo in about a year, but the author is still responding to issues; I really hope it continues to be sustainable for the maintainers! ↩
Well, favourite at the moment; it might change at some point. In the past my favourite styles have progressed through: IEEE, Harvard, BibLaTeX’s alphabetic style, and APA 7th Edition. ↩
Zotero has to be open for this to work ↩