Odds & Ends

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Bullies

Linked to the topic of this page because it relates to film scholarship is the news that Thomson Reuters have filed a lawsuit against Zotero.

As I've written before, I've been using Zotero since I returned to study. I actually get free access to Thomson Reuters' very expensive Endnote software, but have chosen to use Zotero because it's better. I have been building a database of articles using Zotero, and used its Word plugin to manage my citations when I did the first chapter of my Masters. It's fantastic, with the citation management in my document completely seamless and trouble free, and its information capturing abilities (grabbing citation details from library catalogues, journal databases, and other such sources) invaluable.

In short, its brilliant. Given it's a free product, and Endnote costs several hundred dollars, you can see why the Thomson Reuters are worried. While I have no insight into the legalities of the case, what Thomson Reuters are doing certainly seems intuitively unjust: they're accusing Zotero of misusing Endnotes' file formats by reverse engineering them. This hits at the ability of Zotero to import and export Endnote's data files [edit - this probably should just say "read", not "import and export" - see corrections in the comments]: it's roughly the equivalent of Microsoft going after OpenOffice for its ability to open and save Word files. Thomson Reuters' statement about the suit says that they "are absolutely a proponent of interoperability and easy data sharing provided contracts are not breached and intellectual property is respected." Which is a bit disingenuous when the contract they don't want breached is a contract preventing interoperability and easy data sharing.

There's some interesting background and discussion here, here, here, and here. The comments of Mike Madison are particularly interesting (and depressing):

I don't use the software, so I'm speculating a little bit: It looks like the timing of the complaint, and this extraordinary demand to kill Zotero functionality for Zotero users, is related to the imminent release of a Zotero update that would create a shared Zotero commons. Zotero users could easy share their source data with other Zotero users. The complaint challenges the heart of the scholarly research enterprise, the premise that knowledge should be available to all and shareable by all. Thomson/Reuters would like to say, apparently, that if you put that knowledge into EndNote, then Thomson/Reuters is your gatekeeper. That's shameful.

Thomson Reuters' complaint itself is here.

In the meantime, I suggest any academic type readers I might have spread the zotero word (you can get it from the link below), and urge their universities to promote Zotero and / or cancel their EndNote site licenses.

Labels: commentary, research, zotero

Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 6.11.08

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Friday, May 16, 2008

Return of the Spielberg Guy

I really, really, don't want to be typecast as the guy who's always banging on about Spielberg... but it's going to be a difficult couple of weeks on that front. Obviously Indiana Jones is one of those things that I'm just compelled to write about, just as I am always compelled to write about new Star Wars. So obviously there will be material here covering Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in the next week or so.

However, the Spielberg-centrism increases, as my review of two Spielberg-related books has just gone up at Senses of Cinema; you can read it here. The books they asked me to review were Lester Freidman's Citizen Spielberg and Andrew M. Gordon's Empire of Dreams; I liked Friedman's but thought Gordon's was made somewhat silly by its over-enthusiastic adoption of various dubious theoretical models. The article therefore ended up becoming something of a sequel to my previous complaint about silly theory, Is Film Theory Bullshit? I was glad to be able to discuss the books in some sort of wider context though.

As an aside - and here I am starting to speak mainly to any academic or uni student readers I might have - I used the review as a chance to try out Zotero and its associated Word plugins ahead of hopefully using them in my Masters. Count me as very impressed. Zotero is a plug-in for Firefox; you use it to gather, store and annotate research sources into a reference database, and then use the Word plug-in to have it automatically manage your citations. The beauty of it is that it can automatically capture the details of each source out of online resources such as Amazon or library catalogues. I've never got deeply into EndNote, so I can't do a detailed comparison, but I was very taken by the kinds of things Zotero can do, and the ease with which it did it (I was wary of the learning curve with EndNote). I've been doing some Masters research since writing the review and it has been seamlessly grabbing information from academic search indices; it also has very nifty website capturing, storage and cataloging capabilities. If you regularly do research on the web, or write anything that uses formal referencing, I suggest you have a look at it.

Labels: book reviews, research, spielberg, theory, zotero