Getting Started Tutorial
Main steps
First, go download Zotero and sign up for an account. Confirm your email. Log onto the desktop app. Download the Zotero Connector extension.
Next, create a new Zotero group and get the Group ID. It should look something like 5263957. The group has to be public, otherwise the public API doesn't expose it. In theory, this project can also work on individual collections, but I haven't done the API changes needed.
Now put the group ID after the URL on this page. tomato.com becomes tomato.com/5263957.
Integrating Zotero into your workflow
Sci-hub and libgen are great for students and young professionals as they promote the freedom of information to those who are cash-poor. If this is you, search for what you need and drop it into Zotero.
Whenever I come across something interesting, I save it into my Chrome Reading List until I have the time to file it into Zotero using the Chrome extension.
Theory on categorization
Categorization and enumerating (listing out everything like 1, 2, 3) is a fundamental aspect of human organization: we live in three spatial dimensions. URLs are like a file system. We group organisms into different taxa.
The issues in categorization arise when there is sparseness (not enough items to create categories) and when something can belong to multiple categories.
Luckily, Zotero categories are not mutually exclusive: just put your item into multiple collections. And for sparseness, just collect a bunch of articles you like until you start seeing underlying patterns that make sense to sort them with. Using ChatGPT to create categorizations for you doesn't work well because it can't fully simulate your understanding of an article. I think you have to do it manually as there is currently little replacement for human insight.
Being able to see both the individual and the category is important. In reality and nature, things exist along a gradient. Graph-based thinking as popularized by Obsidian is also useful for creating inductive principles from many examples or backtracing a thought process.