Working on the “Visualizing Caribbean Literary Encounters” project this week was quite an eye-opening experience.

I had an opportunity to dive deep into my search for Caribbean literary works from 1981 to 1990, and in doing so, I quickly realized that this time period is rich in material across all genres. Despite having hardly scratched the surface, names like V.S. Naipaul and Kamau Braithwaite appear to be dominating the literary scene within this period. For this reason, as well as due to the guidance received during class discussions, I found it more productive to concentrate on one Caribbean author at a time and work my way through their publications rather than conducting broad searches in the hopes of finding something useful. It is my hope that this technique will continue to be successful in the coming week.

In addition, countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Barbados seemed to be the dominant birth countries of several of these authors, which begs an answer to the question of what significant events occurring within these countries could have contributed towards the emergence of such a strong group of writers, and what was lacking in other Caribbean countries?

Going through this process also demonstrated that duplicate entries in the Zotero folders are inevitable. At first, duplicating the books within my folder was a major concern for me, especially from a technical standpoint, as we are all contributing to each other’s folder in some way. However, after spending some time on the project, I see now that this is unavoidable since multiple editions of the same book were published within the same time period, even in the same year, by different publishers or the same publisher, and these must all be accounted for. In this way, I recognize the importance of metadata because, while several of my entries in my folder may appear to be the same at first glance, there are subtle but critical pieces of metadata that prove otherwise. Furthermore, I believe that before adding any new publications, I should return to the ones I already have and perform a more comprehensive search for available editions.

Finally, I found that Zotero significantly simplified the search process. I frequently found myself being duped by the publication dates that I saw on websites like GoodReads and Amazon, and as a result would add books to my folder believing they were within my time frame when they were actually not. Having Zotero to fact-check me in this way was quite helpful, and it has subsequently encouraged me to verify publication dates and to utilize more reputable and reliable sources, such as WorldCat.

In sum, I have gained quite a bit to think about and to apply to my search techniques for the coming weeks, thus, I am quite excited for what lies ahead.