Author Archives: David

This is a short tutorial for student assistants involved in txt validation.

After having attached the validated “cleantext.txt” file to the parent item, you can safely delete your working copies of GROBID txt and cleantext.

This is a quick tutorial for student assistants with the task of splitting Zotero items that contain more than one article, as found in journals like Lexicographica. This involves downloading, editing, and uploading of Zotero full text attachment files.

For this task, you need:

• A text editor of your choice (on windows, don’t use microsoft “notepad”, install “notepad++” instead, a free and very good editor)
• A good PDF reader, preferably something faster than Acrobat Reader, e.g. “evince“.
• If you work on a laptop, better use a mouse instead of touchpad or touchscreen, since drag-and-drop actions in Zotero are critical, and unwanted drag-and-dropping can cause severe problems.

Two things have to be fixed:

• The Zotero item has to be duplicated, and title and author information have to be filled in manually.
• The TXT text that actually corresponds to the single item has to be isolated and attached.

See how to do it in this video:

This is a quick tutorial for student assistants in charge of editing locations of first authors and articles in LexBib/Elexifinder bibliographical database, using the Zotero software application.

Previous step: You need to have set up the Zotero standalone app, and a user account at Zotero, and have requested membership in LexBib Zotero group. Information about how to get to this point is found here: https://lexbib.org/blog/getting-started-with-zotero/.

For this task, you need:

• A good PDF reader, preferably something faster than Acrobat Reader, e.g. “evince“.
• A web browser, open on this page, which is a service for matching English Wikipedia pages titles provided by eventregistry.org. Here you will search for English Wikipedia page titles that match to places. You can also use English Wikipedia‘s search functions (but there, search results will contain items other than places).
• If you work on a laptop, better use a mouse instead of touchpad or touchscreen, since drag-and-drop actions in Zotero are critical, and unwanted drag-and-dropping can cause severe problems.

We need two sorts of location metadata:

• Location of the first author (“author location“), i.e. the author listed first in the list of authors.
• Location of the article (“article location“). For congress papers (item type “conference paper”) or videos (item type “video”), this location is the location of the corresponding event, i.e., the congress where the contribution was presented (i.e. not necessarily the place where the proceedings volume has been published). For papers published in a volume (journal, collective book volume (item type “book chapter”), books, Thesis, etc., we do not record the article location, as we already have the “publication place” metadatum in Zotero.

We need the English Wikipedia page URL for identifying the location, i.e., we use a location’s English Wikipedia page link (URL) as unambigouus identifier (URI). This is not trivial, since many place names exist several times in the world, and we have to select the matching one. For example, “Cambridge” exists more than a dozen of times, and at least two of them are frequent in bibliographies, as they are locations of Universities (Cambridge, UK and Cambrigde, Massachussetts). We need the unambigouus URI for getting more data about places, e.g. coordinates for a map vizualization.

The first match, “Cambridge“, corresponds to Cambridge, UK, as we can check by clicking on it. Cambridge, Massachussetts, in turn, is described on a Wikipedia page called “Cambridge,_Massachussetts“.

Watch this video about how to find the values for author and article location, and where to paste the Wikipedia URL you find.

Both location URI are pasted into Zotero “extra” field, that should be empty or incomplete. If you find any content other than Wikipedia URL in this field, please delete it. The format is two URL from en.wikipedia.org, separated by a semicolon:

<author_location>; <article-location>

After the semicolon you may add a space and/or end-of-line character (enter key), but no other character, as in this example, where “Copenhagen” is author location, and “Exeter” is article location (note: it doesn’t matter whether these URL start with “http://” or “https://”):

If you are done with an item, don’t forget to remove “_locations_todo” tag from it, as explained in the video (in the video, that tag is called “_no_locations”).

In case you do not find the information in the attached full paper, you can search for the author in the whole LexBib collection, and if you find the author location in another article, and that article is, let’s say, maximum one year older or newer than the one you are doing, or your article is published in the time between two other articles, and in those two you find the same location for the author, then you can assume that the author has not changed location and just use the location you find in the other item. In case you cannot find out the first-author-location at all, please replace the “_locations_todo” tag by the tag “_location_unknown” (delete one and add the other), so that we leave it unsolved like it is and do not look at it again when we filter using “_locations_todo” tag.

This is a quick tutorial for student assistants about how to set up collaboration on LexBib-Elexifinder bibliographical database, via the Zotero application.

Zotero is a personal library and citations manager with a lot of features, very useful for all academics. If you are interested, find information and video tutorials about what Zotero can be used for, on zotero.org or Youtube. What you need to know for your tasks is explained in the following.

LexBib group’s Zotero web library is here: https://www.zotero.org/groups/lexbib/library. This library will be synchronized to your local Zotero application, so that you can change content, and synchronize again with the web version.

First: Download and install Zotero. It usually works out of the box. It needs JAVA. The browser connector that is also offered on the download site is not needed for these tasks, but you can install it if you want.

Second: Register for a Zotero user account. Please use your full name, not a nickname, and chose a username in a way we can recognize you (something close to your real name).

Third: Apply for Zotero LexBib group membership, using the “JOIN” button on LexBib group page. You will have to wait until your request is accepted by the group admininstrators. Please send an email to “team [AT] lexbib.org”, explaining shortly who you are, so that we know that the application is yours, and give you the permission to edit content.

Fourth: Start Zotero, and set preferences according to our recommendations in this short video. As soon as your group application gets accepted, you get synchronized to the Zotero web library, by pressing the “synchronize” button in the top right corner (explained also in the video).

Now you should be ready for checking the tutorial specific for your task.

This is a quick tutorial for student assistants with the task of fixing Zotero items for REVIEW ARTICLES as found in journals like IJL and Lexicographica. This involves downloading, editing, and uploading of Zotero full text attachment files.

Previous step: You need to have set up the Zotero standalone app, and a user account at Zotero, and have requested membership in LexBib Zotero group. Information about how to get to this point is found here.

For this task, you need:

• A text editor of your choice (on windows, don’t use microsoft “notepad”, install “notepad++” instead, a free and very good editor)
• A good PDF reader, preferably something faster than Acrobat Reader, e.g. “evince“.
• If you work on a laptop, better use a mouse instead of touchpad or touchscreen, since drag-and-drop actions in Zotero are critical, and unwanted drag-and-dropping can cause severe problems.

Two things have to be fixed:

• In case the review’s title is generic (like “Review” or “Book Review”), the title of the reviewed book has to become the title of the review article.
• In case the review does not start on top of its starting page, and/or does not end at the bottom of its ending page, the text that does not belong to it has to be deleted from the full text TXT version. That “cleaned” TXT has to be attached then to the Zotero item.

See how to do it in this video: