Exploring Zotero & My Opinion on Annotations
This week we learned about Zotero for curation and citation, and also about the function and importance of annotation.
Curation
I would say that I am a minimalist when it comes to certain technologies, but I am fast to adopt technology that saves me from doing repetitive tasks. One of the most dreadful things experienced in school is finding and formatting references for a paper by hand in MLA, APA, etc. Traditionally if I needed to create references for a paper I would input them into LaTeX first, and that would at least save me from formatting the lines by hand, but I would still have to manually enter all of the information into latex, which is still time consuming and tedious. A wonderful app that fetches all metadata (Author, doi, title, etc) about an article and also formats it into APA, MLA, etc is Zotero. I have been using this app during this semester for some of my classes I can say it’s an absolute game changer for finding references and saves a lot of time. It also accounts for many workflows and technologies that people use like Microsoft Word, LaTeX (BibTex), and HTML for websites. Needless to say, I have adopted this app into my academic app stack and plan to use it in the future.
Annotation
Personally, I have never really found annotation that useful and I only annotate on things that are temporary. The reason I typically don’t like annotating is that I find it clutters the pages of books and is just distracting from the content being read. I find annotations in books too permanent, the nature of exploring ideas is that they change over time, and that they are iterated on and refined. I have always found even highlighting and writing in the margins to cage my thinking rather than exploring and discarding ideas along the way, in an iterative process. Instead of annotating I would rather just take notes while reading. The way I have found annotations to be useful is on temporary things that are only relevant for a short period of time, like schedules, course outlines, and rough drafts of papers.