If you could turn an existing folder structure into an outline that might be helpful too, as that's how I am currently organizing things in lieu of this function.Īfter a little back-and-forth communication between Paul and myself, I think we've worked out a nice solution for tying Zotero for Firefox to external outlining utilities. I'd also want to be able to export just the outline and headings for summaries that may be required for longer arguments, and just the citations for tables of authorities.īeing able to link a subheading in one outline with several subheadings of another outline would be a valuable feature, because areas of law intersect. All I would have to do to churn out a memorandum then is create an outline, generate the structure, headings, citations, and rules of law that they represent, and then fill in the facts of my case. I think if I could create an outline in Zotero with sentence-length headings and then drag and drop items into the outline (which should be in a pane I can see as I go through my library), and then be able to export that structure, the headings, the citations, and the notes I've written for the item, that ought to do it. Sally* I might put "Community property principles do not apply to unwed couples."). I am new to Zotero but I expect to be putting rules of law that a case or a statute represents under an item's notes (e.g., under the notes for *Harry v. And all attorneys writing an argument for the court or a memorandum for a client will organize his/her reasoning and authorities in an outline first, and the final written product will keep the same organization and headings as the outline.Īs for how it should interface, there are outlining software that some people use, which I am not familiar with, that could be looked at. When they graduate many will continue to refer to these outlines to refresh their memories, and some will build on them so they can quickly cite to a useful authority in correspondence, pleadings, and conversations, or find a starting point for research. All law students use outlines to learn their subjects, which will include cases and statutes to illustrate a particular type of rule, and they'll revise and simplify this as time goes on. This is an old discussion, but outlining will be very very useful to law students and practitioners. It would just need an ability to easily make those associations, and to visualize the results in 2D or 3D space, ether mechanically, like Cohere or manually (which I like a lot) like Compendium. In a way the 'guts' of this idea are already in by the plans to establish semantic relations between items. I'm even more interested in this however, since so much academic discussion matches the "dialogue" metaphor quite well, seems to me. Now, could Zotero ever interface with a program like these? This is related to the FreeMind thread, since a similar kind of use of zotero data would be involved. In this one you don't map the dialogue yourself in a 2D space, but you define relationships between ideas (either from a set list or make your own) and it creates a 3D model of the relations for you, which you can explore and zoom in an interesting spinning visualization (which is hard to imagine being useful in its present form, but is a tantilizing glimpse at what might be possible.) The second is a web-based second-generation version of a similar concept It's called Cohere (nice screencast available). It works nicely for identifying the relationships between ideas, but is (a) weak on importing existing data (b) doesn't handle longer notes/excerpts well and (c) has no built-in method to match notes to bibliographic resources. The first is Compendium, a dialogue mapping tool (free, cross-platform, not GPL -yet- but source-available). I've recently been intrigued by two pieces of software which do dialogue mapping, and their potential for bringing together various academic treatments of an issue into a single conversation. I would be glad if, once I had my notes (or excerpts) into zotero I could *do something* with them in ways that would help me (1) "see" the existing academic discussion and (2) plan out my own contribution to it. Bruce's comment at the end of this thread notwithstanding, I like the idea of connecting outlining (or better: dialogue mapping) with Zotero.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |