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The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science
- stared 11y agoI find it ironic that the first line is "Get the guide as a single PDF file.". :)
- sooheon 11y agoWhy? Part of the joy of plain text is that it's simple to convert your content to other formats.
- stared 11y agoI just found it humorous. I totally understand, and practice, the plain text approach (LaTeX, RMarkdown; now: Jekyll, see: http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/02/first-post.html http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/02/first-post.html).
- sooheon 11y agoBrowsed around to your D3 workshop writeup, it's a pretty amazing resource. Thanks :)
- ehudla 11y agoNice way to integrate this kind of workflow with Zotero is zottxt https://gitlab.com/egh/zotxt https://gitlab.com/egh/zotxt .
- ehudla 11y agoIf you write in org and want to export through pandoc there's org-pandoc https://github.com/robtillotson/org-pandoc https://github.com/robtillotson/org-pandoc .
- djhn 11y agoI've been following most of Kieran Healy's workflow recommendations for a while now. I hope these practices get more and more popular.
- amelius 11y agoWhy go through all this trouble if you are a social science student? If I were not into computing, I would probably just use Google Docs for all the drafts, and for the final version, I would copy+paste into Word and give it a finishing touch (proper formatting). (That last step should not be necessary really, because that is the publisher's task, but publishers seem to be getting away with being lazy).
- fao_ 11y agoOne advantage of plain text is that git can easily track the changes.
- ehudla 11y agoI summarize this to my students using two laws and two postulates. Two laws: (1) For long documents, especially if they require citations, bibliographies, mathematical notation, etc. – Word is a poor choice. (2) For documents that take a long time to write and that you want to survive a long time – Word is a poor choice. The problem is that the alternative is to learn a new way of doing things, which may have a long learning curve. So don't kill your research by wasting time learning new tools. But if you can spare some time to learn better tools, you should. To understand the alternative, you need to internalize the two postulates: (1) You should use tools that focus on the semantic aspects of the text, not it's visual appearance. For example: tools that encourage you to say “this is a chapter heading” are good, tools that encourage you to sat “this is Arial-14” are bad. (2) You should save your work in standard file formats. For text, which is most of what we produce, this means TEXT FILES, not Word documents (.doc,.docx) that tend to break when they switch versions.
- hollerith 11y agoI wonder whether in an ideal world there would be an alternative to git that doesnt have git's long learning curve for use by scholars in quantitative disciplines.
- phren0logy 11y agoMercurial is a lot more intuitive, fossil is underrated. Both are probably a better choice for work like this.
- glaberficken 11y ago>"as opposed to binary file formats like .docx" .docx is not a binary file format unlike the .doc files from the past. .docx is a plain text xml based format that has an Open published standard. Most people don't know this, but you can simply unzip the contents of a docx or xlsx file and inspect its plain text contents. Archival and long term accessibility of the document contents should not be the deciding factor in opting out of .docx
- jasode 11y ago>.docx is a plain text xml based format I realize you're trying to elucidate but the context of that author's sentence was "text editors" therefore things like vi/emacs/TextPad/Notepad do not understand a binary format such as a zip file. (And docx is a zip file as you already noted.) Yes, inside the binary zip file is a text file called "document.xml" but none of those plain text editors will parse a zip file to get to that xml file. From the viewpoint of plain text editors, a docx file is an opaque binary format.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoThe stock emacs that ships with osx is not smart enough to dig into a docx file, but the version from here: http://emacsformacosx.com http://emacsformacosx.com is.
- glaberficken 11y agoYeah, i see but my line of thinking was more along: "if I have this docx in 100 years time will I be able to decode its contents?" I think the answer is probably yes (pending possible " "premature" apocalyptic scenarios =) Regarding the zip compression, docx is a "Document Container File" standardized under ISO/IEC, so provided we still have computers and the standard documentation is still know, it should in theory be possible to DEFLATE the file. Inside you would find all the text content as xml, and as some have pointed out here, binary blobs as well. Those would be mostly font files and image files (or am I missing some others that would be important?). In my opinion the fonts would not be critical to the content meaning. The images would of course depend on what format they were encoded in. But that's a whole other discussion!