Zotero

I have been using Zotero off and on for a year when needed. However, I prefer to do my citations by hand and work on paper, I find writing helps me remember and visualize. In fact, spacial navigation and physical information is what my thesis is centered around.

My Zotero Library

Nevertheless Zotero has many advantages especially for digital sources, my favorite feature is the FireFox/Office addons, it makes citing digital sources and importing them into word a breeze. There is however a significant error margin and many citations have to be corrected or filled in by hand; Zotero is not a do all solution.

Overview of Zotero - info, notes, tags, and related

But once the source is in Zotero the features such as tags, collections/sub, and notes provide a fantastic digital organization system.Lastly another neat feature is the timeline, letting you visualize your information across time, great for making connections to old theories!

Zotero Timeline

Last week I dedicated one of my laptops to this thesis, did a clean OS install and installed Office, Acrobat, and Zotero. I dedicated laptops to my two big/regular clients last year and found it was extremely helpful to have everything in one workable place. Right now I have my digital sources separate from my physical sources (ie. Books). By the weekend I hope to have everything inputted into and noted in Zotero aka. my digital annotated bibliography.

I have also been working on a rough flow for a concept map, which has helped me begin to discover how my sources and ideas fit together.

I printed this and over the week used it as a place to write important notes on.

This process has also been helping me a lot with developing my thesis statement, especially with forming terms that capture complex ideas.

My pitch again.

Design plays a large role in our transition with technology. My research is searching for methods that connect digital information to the tangible world in order to aid human transition with technology, reduce fragmentation, and facilitate comprehension. Transitioning interaction from the physical page to the dynamic page is a call to preserve our natural spatial relationship with physical information in digital environments.

My latest thesis statement

With increasing technological convergence and exponential growth, design plays a vital role in aiding human-technological transitions. Understanding how people navigate and interact with physical information can help design and develop physically augmented virtual spaces that produce contextually relevant digital information. The results bridge the human-digital cognitive gap in the dynamic page and helps preserve our natural spatial relationship with physical information in a digital world.

A Working Example

This week I started to look into ways to defend my thesis both statistically and with examples. I plan to have my interactive presentation powered by an interface that defends my thesis. I will put the platform online very soon so you guys can help me test it!