References define us as researchers as well as a research community as they represent our work or are used to ground theory in our work. Therefore, it is important to structure references properly, and online tools such as Zotero are initiatives to help organising references in a library. Aside from personal use, the concept of the reference library can be explored as a collective space of knowledge.
That's our red thread.
This initiative aims at conceiving a Zotero library as a collaborative space for interaction and discussion on the references contained in it, in order to display the links between researches and between researchers using a series of scripts in Python.
That's our plan.
On the occasion of the Workshop that was at the inspiration of the site, researchers were invited to join a group library and to participate by adding references, structuring existing information, writing notes about their reading experiences, etc.
That's our corpus.
To play with our research data, the tool Graph Ta Recherche (GTR) enables to fetch Zotero library and produce with Python visualisations of informations and links to show that our references are more than just the articles or books they refer to, and that they are part of a real knowledge network.
That's our play.
The Graphs can be produced from the Play page. The code that thinks links between our researches is explained in the Documentation page.