Quote from Donna Cox Baker on May 5, 2023, 5:43 pm

Thanks, Dan. I have created a new version myself in the past, and it's a great option for people who know how to modify the CSL. Unfortunately my brain wasn't able to get around it when I tried, but maybe I'll try again when I have more time to put to it.

Let me ask your advice on this....How do you handle changes that are being made to the original CMOS style, as rules are refined, etc. Are you manually making those to your copy or is there a way to have your copy dynamically pulling those changes in?

 

P.S. This forum has not been terribly active since someone in Korea was using the forum to bomb us all with casino ads in the middle of the night. There were usually around 400 messages before I woke up and disabled the account on three different occasions. I think many turned off the option to be notified of new messages. But I think my spam software has been catching the culprits pretty well in the last year. It would be great to get people back into the conversation, especially around Evidence Explained. We all have questions and workarounds and could benefit from that interaction. I will send a message to the Genohistory mailing list some time this week to encourage another start. Thanks!

Quote from dandennison84 on May 5, 2023, 5:56 pm

Part 2

Basic

1. Have a way to test your citations. Zotero itself won't be able to show you the full first note citation, you'll need output for that (Word or whatever else you use). You can open a basic testing tool in Zotero from the style sheet page. Style Preview.
2. XML is a hierarchical structure of elements and attributes. An XML tag is something enclosed in '<' and '>'. Attributes are name/value pairs that are part of the element. CSL uses both a lot. See step-2-zotero-ee for an example.
   1. The red circle shows two attributes. They are used to describe something about the element.
   2. The blue circle is an element. It has a set of attributes and optionally something inside of it. Another element or text as shown here.
   3. The green circle is an element that is a collection of other elements.
3. The CSL file structure although it looks large and intimidating is really quite simple to understand.
   1. Boilerplate stuff at the front. You will almost never have to worry about it. Choosing CMOS as your starter fills all the stuff you need in for you for note-style citations.
   2. Macros elements that are called from other places that output the text you see. This is most of the CSL file. You will need to modify these or create your own. I'll show you how in Part 3.
   3. One Citation element. This is the overall structure of the citation. You will rarely touch this.
   4. One Bibliography element. This is the overall structure of the bib. You will rarely touch this.
4. To understand CSL, you need to undertand the verbs, things you can do, and the nouns, things that are done to or done with.
   1. The nouns are fairly easy. They are the things you act on or use to make decisions: author, title, book/manuscript/newpaper, date, etc.
   2. The verbs are the elements and attributes. They allow you to do things: "text," "layout," "group," "if," etc.
5. There are only a few things you really need to understand to be productive.
   1. The Rendering Elements section of the the Spec. It includes: Layout, Text, Date, Number, Label, Group, and Choose. That is it, those are the main things you have to understand.
   2. CSL are laid out by defining a Citation element and a Bibliography element at the bottom of the file. Those elements specify the ordering of the elements for each. Within each of those elements, you'll see calls to various Macro. You'll change those macros to make the citations more EE-like. See step-3-zotero-ee for an example.

 

Quote from Linda Morgan Clark on May 5, 2023, 6:13 pm

All well and good, I suppose. But all I have now is another CMOS with a new name after Step 1. Do I now have to learn how to modify the rest of it to get it to resemble not just "closely" but have an actual EE format? In other words, I need more complete instructions than steps 2 & 3.

 

Quote from dandennison84 on May 5, 2023, 6:15 pm

Part 3

Examples

1. Comments: Use these to document what you do and why you did it. I always add my initials. You also use them to comment out code you don't want to run any more. See step-4-zotero-ee.
2. Proxy: These are Macros you write to intercept an existing macro that you don't want to completely replace. You use these when you don't want to break things because you don't completely understand what it is doing and you only want to make a local change. For example, I only want to change Manuscripts. I want to leave books and everything else alone. Your general approach is to decide what you want to change and localize that change to minimize the impact.
3. Example: Lets remove italics/quotes from the titles of manuscripts. See step-5-zotero-ee. For completeness, we'd have to change it in ibid, subsequent, and regular. We'll only do regular. We search for the citation layout and look through the citation to where it calls title macros. The red circle looks like the right macro.
4. Looking at the macro, notice that there various text calls. Some have attributes like quotes="true" or font-style="italic". We don't want any of that. If you look at the structure of the macro, it is a large if..then..else kind of thing. Or goal is to bypass all the stuff we don't want and pick what we do what. Note step-5-zotero-ee. I added an else-if to only match manuscript types and I make it only output the raw text, no formatting.

Quote from dandennison84 on May 5, 2023, 6:42 pm

Part 4

Next Steps

1. My main goal was to show you how to set up your own CSL file so you can get EE-style citations. There are many ways to skin the cat so to speak on how you would set up your own CSL file depending on your needs.
2. Since all of our workflows differ, I'll only give some general guidance on proceeding further.
   1. Decide on what it is you need out of the EE-style citations in Zotero. For me, they are peripheral. I have a workflow where I generate an EE-style citation for all of my sources and keep them in a plain text markdown file.
   2. What I needed from Zotero was for my research notes to print citations that I can use personally during the research phase. My workflow exports Zotero citations and my editing software reads those citations and formats them using the CSL libraries. Since there is no EE library, I have to use CMOS. See the two attached examples for the difference. I'm using CMOS CSL in one and my modified EE CSL in the other.
3. Minimize the changes to the CMOS structure as a whole. If you looked at my examples, I only make small changes. For example, I'm only changing manuscripts (formatting) and in some cases, contributors on manuscripts (hacking a way for government entities to look right). You could pick any of the elements to change.
4. I'm not sure layered citations are really possible wholly; you can only do a few things like changing delimiters and maybe using some fields that aren't normally used in your document type. Here is the current mapping between Zotero fields and CSL: https://aurimasv.github.io/z2csl/typeMap.xml

Quote from dandennison84 on May 5, 2023, 6:52 pm

Quote from Donna Cox Baker on May 5, 2023, 5:43 pm

Thanks, Dan. I have created a new version myself in the past, and it's a great option for people who know how to modify the CSL. Unfortunately my brain wasn't able to get around it when I tried, but maybe I'll try again when I have more time to put to it.

Let me ask your advice on this....How do you handle changes that are being made to the original CMOS style, as rules are refined, etc. Are you manually making those to your copy or is there a way to have your copy dynamically pulling those changes in?

 

P.S. This forum has not been terribly active since someone in Korea was using the forum to bomb us all with casino ads in the middle of the night. There were usually around 400 messages before I woke up and disabled the account on three different occasions. I think many turned off the option to be notified of new messages. But I think my spam software has been catching the culprits pretty well in the last year. It would be great to get people back into the conversation, especially around Evidence Explained. We all have questions and workarounds and could benefit from that interaction. I will send a message to the Genohistory mailing list some time this week to encourage another start. Thanks!

No worries, there doesn't seem to be an active community anywhere working on EE-style citations outside of some proprietary tree programs. I just started doing this because I was getting annoyed when printing out my research notes and seeing the CMOS citations for things like Census and basically any kind of archival record. Annoyed enough to try and fix it at least partially. I'm not interested in creating an EE version of CSL full-time. I base my version it on CMOS so I didn't have to change more than I had to. The way I modify it is right now I really only change Manuscript. If I was concerned about change management, I would run a diff program on the CMOS changes and merge them into my copy. It isn't that hard to do if the changes aren't drastic.

I hope more people start talking about researching processes/workflows and citation/source management. I have a passing knowledge of CMOS, I have Turabian on ILL right now. My gosh what a great book that is! Great tips on research in general. I have EE and I have Mastering Genealogical Documentation on ILL as well right now. Reading through these is giving me more ideas on this. We need Zotero to add an Archival type with some limited fields. I understand they don't want an explosion of types and fields because of how EE is laid out. On the other hand, I don't believe it is needed to get layered citations and archival material handled better.

Quote from dandennison84 on May 5, 2023, 6:59 pm

Quote from Linda Morgan Clark on May 5, 2023, 6:13 pm

All well and good, I suppose. But all I have now is another CMOS with a new name after Step 1. Do I now have to learn how to modify the rest of it to get it to resemble not just "closely" but have an actual EE format? In other words, I need more complete instructions than steps 2 & 3.

 

I apologize, I sort of posted my thoughts in a series. Let me know what you think after Part 4. "An actual EE format" is going to be exceedingly difficult. For things that CMOS handles, I don't really see the point. Books, newspapers, etc. I really think I am going to restrict myself to two things:

1. Producing better Archive results (i.e., unpublished stuff). Vital Certificates, census, government records, etc.
2. Layered citations. What is possible and what would Zotero and CSL have to do to make it possible in some minimal fashion?

So in my case, I just wanted my Vital Certs to look good in my research notes. For something I produce for other people, I hand-craft my EE citations for now. If you give me some scenarios, I can probably figure out what you'd need to do or at least tell you it is possible.

Quote from Donna Cox Baker on May 5, 2023, 9:07 pm

Well, Dan, I'm pretty blown away by what your mind can put together in just a few hours. I think a perpetual conversation on how to make citations and notes work for us is SO needed. The last time I did a truly citation-heavy piece of writing, it was my PhD dissertation, and CMOS got it done. I am hearing so much angst from genealogists about EE and their fear they'll never do it right. I know of huge project on hold because of EE-freeze. And yet, I just read Elizabeth Mills's first two chapters again and am in awe, as always of the wisdom that lies there. I feel that we get messed up on the details. I have a lot of work to do to get to a system I'm comfortable with, but I am using the Location in Archive field to hold the information EE would say I need, when there's no logical place for it.

There are four things I believe really matter in a citation--and they matter way more than syntax. The first three come from EE, and the last from the publishing world. Here are my mandates:

1. Make sure the citation can take me back to the source.
2. Make sure my citation can take a reader to the source (if publicly available).
3. Make sure the citation gives the reader an adequate idea of the value of the source (i.e., is it indirect, derivative, copy of a copy?)
4. Are my citations consistently handled?

I am taking Dr. Mills at her word that citations are an art and not a science.

I am eager for us to talk together about how our "art" is emerging. How do we create great citations that get the job done without taking longer to create than it took us to read and capture notes on the subject at hand?

And another question coming up in my circles a LOT is how can we have some material in tree software and some in Zotero and end up with consistent citations?  That will be another great thing for us to hash out.

Thanks so much for bringing this center stage, Dan. It's time has definitely come. I will try to bring more of the Genohistory.com crowd here in days to come, so we have the voices we need.

Quote from dandennison84 on May 5, 2023, 10:10 pm

Thanks, I should also mention I have your book as well 😛 I've been using Zotero for awhile then saw your book and got that as well a few years ago. It set me off to thinking about how genealogy could really benefit from the research model that Zotero already supports.

I think everyone should read Mastering Genealogical Documentation. Jones makes some great points on why people struggle with genealogical documentation. In many cases, it boils down to not really understanding the source we are looking at, forgetting that crafting them is more art and science and being over-reliant on templates. He goes so far as to suggest crafting your own until you really understand it.

I think genealogy technology is focused on the wrong end of things. Everything is essentially output based and little to no focus on the research process. A good example of wasted resources are commercial companies building their own, proprietary reference management systems. That is just insane. Why not just use Zotero or plug in to it? Or use bib, json, or csl? By focusing on tree programs, it makes it impossible or difficult to research with FANs, to hold alternate facts easily and clearly and put our citations mechanics in one place, once and for all. A big reason I use plain text is I am sick and tired of redoing citations every time I change programs.

Evidentia is one bright light in that space but has also went down the road of proprietary source management making it next to useless for me. I think of all the hours these programmers are spending re-inventing the wheel, badly, when they could be creating a better research product. Just think of all those companies got together, decided to use bib/json/csl/etc and hired a small group to write and maintain the EE CSL (or as much of it as possible given the limits)?