While not a research endeavor in the strictest sense, this tiny project has its place in our hearts, without any doubt. It is a little plugin that helps to format bibliographic references according to the style required by the proceedings (aka books of abstracts) of the main annual Digital Humanities conference, but also used in our flagship journal Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.

Everyone who has ever published a research paper, knows quite well how tedious it is – and often frustrating – to deal with bibliographic references. Particularly, remembering about all the minor trivia, such as where to put a comma rather than a dot, where to switch to italics, and how to abbreviate page numbers, might feel intimidating if not challenging for most of us.

It cannot be stressed enough how helpful bibliography managers are, e.g. Zotero, to deal with the said issue. If set up properly, they just take over all the formatting and styling. Unfortunately, the bibliographic style used by the DH community has not been supported “just like this”. The current project was launched to come in rescue.

First introduced at the DH2016 conference in Kraków, and authored by Maciej, the following style definition was released:

https://github.com/computationalstylistics/DHAbstracts_biblio_style

It’s an open-source repository, so feel free to grab it and use it! The file digital_humanities_abstracts.csl should be downloaded and installed in Zotero. However, it can be used with other bibliography managers too (see below).

Those who use MS Word as their daily writer, should check out the functionalities of Zotero with a dedicated MS Word plugin. Using bibliographic entries with such a combination of tools is extremely easy, and kind of awesome! LibreOffice users will find a similar plugin, too, and the same applies to the combination of GoogleDocs and Zotero.

More adventurous users (including all diehard geeks) might want to explore the art of writing scholarly articles directly in plain text, using Markdown codes for minimal styling, and BibTeX files to store the accompanying bibliography. Without any doubt, It’s the pinnacle of scholarly reproducibility, since both the code and the actual paper are integrated, and can easily be put on any public repository. There are a few ways of writing in plain text mode.

A great introduction to writing your stuff in Markdown and then rendering it using pandoc is the following lesson at Programming Historian. R users might want to discover the package Rmarkdown to get to the next level. It allows the users to combine the code and the narrative in one file. The code is then being evaluated (compiled), and all the plots, generated on the fly, are nicely put where you want them to appear in your manuscript. Finally, the users who value both simplicity and visual refinement, should definitely try out Quarto, which allows not only to write static papers, websites, and presentations, but also to create dynamic content with Python, R, Julia, and Observable.

In order to unleash the potential of rendering your manuscripts with automatically generated references, you need to have the .cls file with your bibliography style, the bibliography itself, stored in a .bib file, and obviously the manuscript itself – usually a .md file formatted using Markdown. In the .md file, you’re supposed to define a few things, including the bibliographic style to be used. Here’s a dummy example how such a file might look like:

---
title: "My new exciting paper"
author: Maciej Eder
date: 29.07.2025
output: 
  html_document:
    pandoc_args: [ --mathjax, -f, markdown+tex_math_double_backslash ]
    fig_width: 7
    fig_height: 5
bibliography: bibliography.bib
csl: digital_humanities_abstracts.csl
---

## Introduction

Here's the content of my paper with some bibliographic 
references [@JoyceLetters1957] that will then be rendered 
according to the style definition. The References section
will be appended automatically to the end of the resulting
file -- be it PDF, HTML, or whatever you define.

## Conclusions

The conclusions will be added later.

Actually, most of the pages on this CSG website have been authored using the above technology. E.g. this blog post is a good example.