I’ve recently signed up to complete a university course that, eventually, will give me an Executive MBA. Naturally, I’m both excited and apprehensive in equal measure.
Excited because I adore learning. Especially learning when I’ve already been “practicing” some areas of the subject, and I get to match up existing knowledge with the theory and expand my knowledge and skills too.
Apprehensive because I already have at least one full time job, a proclivity towards side-projects (watch all good Podcast apps near you in the next month or so) and a timetable that is terrifying me.
But I have to admit that in the midst of excitement and apprehension, I had forgotten about referencing. A skill one can never truely master, because while there are sort-of-systems like Harvard, each institution has its own take on it with – quite often, in my view – subtle differences between them.
I remembered back at Brighton University being able to set up the tool in Word to make sure that my referencing was all proper and correct, and so naturally I assumed that – what with enhancements to technology since then being legion – I could do the same.
But it actually seems to have gotten harder. One can no longer import different styles of referencing into Word, and instead we need to rely on plugins and extras.
After a tour through Mendeley, which it turns out doesn’t seem to like Microsoft Word for Mac (or I couldn’t kick off their love affair, at least) I settled on Zotero. Mendeley and Zotero alike rely on – I learnt – CSL, and there is it would seem no freely available CSL for Arden University’s version of Harvard (AU Harvard).
This set me on a mission. I am far from a programmer, but I can generally understand what’s going on and – coupled with ChatGPT – it didn’t seem beyond the realms to take an original version of Harvard and make the updates.
How wrong I was. ChatGPT was universally unable to make the changes – which amounted to a few bits of punctuation changing, and a few differences in wording – without causing Zotero to throw an error.
After almost an hour of bug-fixing, testing and so on while being continually flattered by ChatGPT’s psycophantic praise of my ability to copy and paste the error message I was getting, I thought… Why don’t I try Grok?
Well, to my surprise, it managed it. With a bit of an Elon personality (it announced “YES, IT MATCHES EXACTLY” when it completed the work), Grok was able to take an open source Harvard CSL and adapt it according to Arden University’s Guide.
I had remembered that formal education could be a bit of a (worthwhile) pain in adult life: time management is harder with more responsibilities, and it can be jarring to have to sacrifice social events in favour of study from time to time when you’ve got used to owning your free time, but I had entirely forgotten how much it pales in insignificance when compared to how much of a pain getting referencing exaclty right can be.
I’m hoping – yet to be confirmed, of course – that I’ve managed it. And as I like contributing back to the world, I thought I’d pop it here in case you were looking for a free Arden University Harvard CSL file to import into Zotero. YMMV, so use it at your own risk – but I’ll update here if I find it has turned out to be wrong somehow.
Perhaps that’ll make referencing less painful?
