looking east

I have been looking for a bibliography software for a while. One in which I can keep all my references, quotations and notes to support the final editing of a paper. Bibtex export is therefore an absolute must-have. I have been testing four different applications so far: Bibliographix, Visual Composer, Wikindx and Zotero. The former two have supported me through my last years at university. Although I don’t mind paying a license if the product is really good, none of the two have completely convinced me so far. I have to admit though that I was very happy with Visual Composer for a while.

With my master thesis in mind, I was looking for something new (read: modern), more complete that allows me to store all kinds of documents together with my bibliographical data with strong metadata support for categorisation and search. I consequently downloaded Wikindx, a web-based bibliographical software (implemented in PHP) with collaboration support. I discovered that it’s features were comparable to those of Visual Composer, though open source and free. The installation is pretty straightforward, however it requires Apache2 and MySQL. A separate module can be downloaded for data import through Amazon Web Services. After a few initial touches to the CSS, Wikindx turned out to be very interesting. In addition, being an open source would allow me to add more features by myself, such as the possibility to add links and upload files for the different resources.

I just was about to import the Wikindx sources to eclipse when I discovered another bibliographical software: Zotero. Zotero, still a beta, is being developed at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. On the website, they say:

“An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and—on many major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields.”

I am quite excited about Zotero and, if it is really as good as they promise, it’s exactly what I have been looking for.

My search for a master topic has already begun over a year ago. But then a job came in my way and I decided to first get some work experience (it was such a great opportunity, I simply couldn’t say no). Now I am trying to get back on track, recapitulating what I have previously read.

I started out reading Bruno Latour’s Science in Action, trying to first learn something about social science methods and how to think about technical objects and scientific papers. In his book, Latour observes scientists in their laboratories and shows how inventions are actually made. He also analyses the process of writing scientific papers and shows why these are so hard to read, but why they are so important to scientists. Bruno Latour uses the concept of black boxes for scientific theories and shows how a theory cited and recited by other scientists finally become a fact.

I also read Howard S. Becker’s work about the Art Worlds in which he shows that art is not the result of a single person’s work but that art is the achievement of a number of people. Becker thus analyses a number of different kinds of artwork and shows how they depend on many other things than just the artist. Becker’s work is interesting for my thesis because he places a work of art in a specific context that has supported or even enabled its production. Therefore one could say that art depends on the “cultural” context. And it is this context that I want to investigate, or rather the transfer from one context to another and its influence on the final product.