Keeping Track

Documenting sources.

For the last ten years or so I have audited courses at my alma mater. The price to audit is very attractive and I take courses that enhance my research and writing. Would I like to take a survey course and spend the semester reading say, Virginia Woolf or Toni Morrison? Sure but those courses wouldn’t necessarily allow me to learn a new way of doing something, although one can always learn from fiction. ALWAYS. 

I took Introduction to Cultural Anthropology so I could take Ethnographic Writing and Methods. I took World Histories of Wine (an eye opener if there ever was one) so I could learn about wine within an academic infrastructure.

Besides the topics,  I learned about tools that were certainly not available when I went to school. 

One of the most important tools I now use is Zotero. It is a bibliographic aid and so much more. If I refer to a book or read it, I put it into Zotero. You can add books to the list via the ISBN or other identifiers. Obviously you don’t have to only use it for research, you can use it to keep track of books you have read or books you want to read.

You can get as detailed as you want on Zotero in terms of annotating. I use tags if I want to identify a book as being about gin or about the history Italian wine or an essay about Abruzzo wines. It is easier to tag at the beginning when you are entering than later on when perhaps you don’t remember specific subject matters.

Whether it is a podcast, a film or artwork, Zotero will give you the correct format so that you can fill in the appropriate information to correctly be able to cite the work.

Search functions for academic libraries allow you to cite for Zotero and will format it. 

There is a lot to like about Zotero and yes it has limitations but as a free, open source software program that can help you organize your research it is hard to beat. I would welcome any suggestions that for any other programs that can help one organize research. Also, it’s free.

I think that wine and spirits writers could benefit from Zotero. It is a good way to keep track of resources and not have to rely on memory. Also I like that I don’t have to create a footnote or an endnote or a bibliography by hand like we used to have to do.

Below are examples of citation styles (you can also created the bibliography styles) for one of my favorite commodity history books, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World by Barbara Rappaport

APA Style

Rappaport, E. D. (2019). A thirst for empire: How tea shaped the modern world (First papeback printing). Princeton University Press.

Chicago Manual of Style

Rappaport, Erika Diane. A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World. First papeback printing. Princeton University Press, 2019.

MLA

Rappaport, Erika Diane. A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World. First papeback printing, Princeton University Press, 2019.

Turabian

Rappaport, Erika Diane. A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World. First papeback printing. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019.