Re: [emacs-humanities] How do you keep engaged with your writings?

[Göktuğ Kayaalp]

On 2021-01-31 13:07 -08, Gary Klimowicz <gak@pobox.com> wrote:
> Yes, and that was what I was doing for a while. But the switching cost
> between the two sets of directories was high. The PDF library has some
> 500+ folders and 3000+ PDFs (covering many more topics than what I
> need for my planned research project). It's more like the "stacks" in
> a library where important, but seldom-used books are kept.
>
> I'm leaning toward something that forces me to curate the collection,
> for my own sanity.

My way of dealing with this has been to use Zotero and Org mode with
org-zotxt as the glue.

All my reading notes go into a Reading.org (which is getting pretty
large and laggy, so probably I’ll split it per year from now on).  Each
thing I read---paper, book, sometimes even a webpage---gets it’s own
toplevel heading, in the form

* TITLE ";" AUTHOR( ["," AUTHOR]+ | "et. al") (TAGS)?
ORG-ZOTXT-LINK

Left click on the link selects the relevant item in Zotero. C-c " i is
for inserting these links. C-u C-c " i inserts link for selected item.
C-c " a opens the relevant Zotero attachment using the relevant
application.  Zotero has great search (full text too in advanced
search), and on the Org side I use tools like isearch, occur, deft as
necessary.  I’ve modified org-zotxt links so that they expand to:

\fullcite{CITEKEY} [citekey: @CITEKEY]

In Zotero I create collections for projects. Items can appear in
multiple collections.  I use Better BibTeX to generate nice and
practical surname1900 style citation keys, and to output .bib files in
BibLaTeX format. While the project goes on, I have Better BibTeX
auto-export the .bib file.  At the end of the project I delete that
association so that the .bib file is frozen.

For actual citations in the document I’m preparing I use
\(auto|text|full)cite[sp\*]? as appropriate. I’ve a couple Org mode
files that I #+include for this kinda stuff but I haven’t had time to
make a proper template yet.

My reading notes mostly go onto the PDF files themselves as annotations,
and I use Okular for that.  I am kinda liberal in how much I
abuse^Wannotate my PDFs.

Now that I’m starting my thesis, this whole thing will be put under some
real strain and I’ll see if it survives, but for now, this is how I do
things.  Maybe it’ll be useful to you.

It’s not optimal tho because Zotero is great but it’s such a PITA to
integrate it with the rest of your system. Even the first class
supported Office apps are generally a PITA to use, and in general
getting stuff into and out of Zotero has terrible ergonomics.  I really
wish to write my own, modular, IPC/API based reference manager one
day...

Best,

        -gk.