Re: NYC DH Week

[Scot Mcphee <scot.mcphee-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

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On 10 January 2017 at 04:12, John Muccigrosso <jmuccigr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org <mailto:jmuccigr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>> wrote:
On Saturday, January 7, 2017 at 7:45:39 AM UTC-5, Scot Mcphee wrote:

> On 06 Jan 2017, at 05:07 , John Muccigrosso <jmuc...-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org <>> wrote:
> 
> pandockers,
> 
> (Thought I might have coined a phrase, but I see it's been used a couple of times. @jgm, you should ™ that.)
> 
> I just found out that I'm doing a workshop at the NYC DH week in a month (Feb 9, 1-3pm, to be precise). I've called it "Making the most of text: Using a text-only workflow with markdown and pandoc".
> 
> Any suggestions/tips gratefully appreciated.

Hi John

What sort of suggestions were you after. I do quite a lot of DH in Classics on the programming side, but my thesis (which is not DH-based, but straight classics/ancient history) is fully written in pandoc style markdown. Classics has been using digital tools a lot longer than most other humanities disciplines (witness Perseus), because of its long relationship with philology, linguistics, and use of tools like concordances.

Whenever I strike my fellow postgrads struggling with Word issues, I keep telling people to use markdown to write their thesis in markdown. They freak out. They think it’s difficult, when a thesis document nearly all text and simple to write in markdown. Our systems pretty much train them in undergraduate courses to use Word and never let up from that point.

Scot.


Scott,

I'm looking for whatever people have found useful when introducing the concept of a text-only workflow to academics, and then adding the pandoc icing on the cake.

So it's wide open. :-)

I expect most people to be beginners or even completely new to the idea, though they will sign up for the workshop and so be self-selected, which should mean that they are at least open to the idea.

So fire away.

John

In the main, I find the following arguments have worked to more or less some degree:

In the Humanities you don't need a lot of formatting: titles, headers, italics, quotes, citations and footnotes only, typically. Argue against Word - I’ve had to rescue at least a couple of theses from impending doom because Word had somehow got into its head to corrupt the file. Also, I used pandoc to help fix my wife’s academic book formatting problems, just before she submitted the manuscript. It had way too many ad-hoc text formats: margins that weren’t consistent, text sizing and paragraph spacing all over the place (especially in block quotes and footnotes) - all actually pretty typical formatting fails that I find even in many business documents (let alone long format text docs). It was a simple matter to export each chapter doc out from Word, into pandoc markdown, where most of the problems could be solved with simple regular expression driven search and replace, then run pandoc to regenerate clean, sensible, consistent Word docs.

Also, you’re talking to a DH audience: pandoc is an easy way to publish in multiple formats, e.g. Word, PDF and HTML, from the one source document. Separation of content and format is a vital part of most computing disciplines. Format for the particular device on-the-fly, usually at the device (e.g. “responsive” websites). Pandoc is the best tool for doing this with long-form writing. Convert them to the simplicity of a text editor; the ease of search and replace in such tools (plus the choice of multiple tools: I use mainly Sublime Text but I do fall back sometimes to BBEdit). 

Give them a demo of how easy it is to user and get readable documents.  Finally, show them the PDFs you get from Pandoc. They look fantastic! I know that’s mainly LaTeX, but I would not try to sell most humanities people on LaTeX, it’s too complex for most of their needs. Pandora’s markdown is a simple and readable format, and you still get the lovely typesetting of LaTeX.


Scot
 

Scot Mcphee. 
Computer programmer. Classics PhD.
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