3 ms·

The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science [pdf]

41 points by adulau 10y ago

LglActvst 10y ago
fascinating. the author nails it here: "there is little to be gained from plain-text dogmatism in a .docx world." my f'in life...
danso 10y ago
I've made it a side-mission of mine to convince journalists to work in plaintext as much as possible. For all the concern of novices being intimidated by plaintext and code (plaintext basically is code as far as most laypeople is concerned), GUI-heavy software and rich text exact their own cognitive toll, not just in the form of having to keep up with interface upgrades (I've yet to move from Office 2011 to 2016), but in the way the user has to be trained to memorize the quirks of how the software modifies the data. Excel is the obvious example here, e.g. zero-padded unique ids `00011` becoming `11`, dates turning into numbers like `41566`, and that's before you get into the madness that comes when trying to import/export data (think Mac-style line-endings into QGIS into Mac OSX Office, etc.). At some point, it's just easier to take some time and be comfortable with the idea that things can be represented in plaintext. That data doesn't magically become data because software is used to open it. I've spent a good amount of time having to convince people that that CSV text file I sent them is not just random gibberish (trying to figure out how people's systems are set up to open certain files upon double-clicking is also not fun). The inability to understand how software and data (human-readable plaintext or otherwise) can be separated is not limited to the humanities majors. Here's a case in which a civil engineer convinced the Ohio Supreme Court that using Esri ArcGIS inextricably tied the software to the (publicly-funded) GIS data, meaning that any member of the public who wants a copy of geospatial data in a form other than printed map will have to cough up an extra $2,000: http://spatiallyadjusted.com/use-esri-gis-and-your-data-becomes-inextricably-intertwined/ http://spatiallyadjusted.com/use-esri-gis-and-your-data-beco...
hackuser 10y ago
I love text editors, especially Vim. However, I realize we no longer are tied to paper or use low-power, low-bandwidth computers. Images, still and moving, effectively are as easily handled by the computing platform as words. I believe the reason humans have used text so much more than images so far is that never before in history have we had a platform that efficiently handles multimedia. I need to effectively express myself using images; you can see people naturally doing that for casual purposes with Snapchat, etc.[0] But even with my eyes opened and my willingness to move forward, I'm limited by available tools. There is no productivity tool that a user can use to efficiently process mixed text and image (and audio). We need a Vim for multimedia, or at least a Word. [0] Yes, text is still a great tool, but it's not the best tool for every job.
irickt 10y ago
Here's a web version of the document: http://plain-text.co http://plain-text.co
austinjp 10y ago
This isn't working for me on mobile, gives a failed download of 0kb. If as irickt says this refers to http://plain-text.co http://plain-text.co then I'd say I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. Leverage the tools that are battle tested: plain text and version control. Of course, it's an uphill battle. If your boss expects to add track-change comments to a Word .docx then your pristine text-based processes are going to get tarnished. Personally I've been experimenting with github.com + gitbook.com for generation of book-like documents. I tried a hand-rolled toolchain based around pandoc but realised that i could write plugins for gitbook, with far more reliability. I'll have reached the holy grail when editors submit pull requests instead of track-changes Word docs attached to emails. I expect this to never happen.

41 points by adulau 10y ago

fascinating. the author nails it here: "there is little to be gained from plain-text dogmatism in a .docx world." my f'in life...

danso 10y ago

I've made it a side-mission of mine to convince journalists to work in plaintext as much as possible. For all the concern of novices being intimidated by plaintext and code (plaintext basically is code as far as most laypeople is concerned), GUI-heavy software and rich text exact their own cognitive toll, not just in the form of having to keep up with interface upgrades (I've yet to move from Office 2011 to 2016), but in the way the user has to be trained to memorize the quirks of how the software modifies the data. Excel is the obvious example here, e.g. zero-padded unique ids `00011` becoming `11`, dates turning into numbers like `41566`, and that's before you get into the madness that comes when trying to import/export data (think Mac-style line-endings into QGIS into Mac OSX Office, etc.). At some point, it's just easier to take some time and be comfortable with the idea that things can be represented in plaintext. That data doesn't magically become data because software is used to open it. I've spent a good amount of time having to convince people that that CSV text file I sent them is not just random gibberish (trying to figure out how people's systems are set up to open certain files upon double-clicking is also not fun). The inability to understand how software and data (human-readable plaintext or otherwise) can be separated is not limited to the humanities majors. Here's a case in which a civil engineer convinced the Ohio Supreme Court that using Esri ArcGIS inextricably tied the software to the (publicly-funded) GIS data, meaning that any member of the public who wants a copy of geospatial data in a form other than printed map will have to cough up an extra $2,000: http://spatiallyadjusted.com/use-esri-gis-and-your-data-becomes-inextricably-intertwined/ http://spatiallyadjusted.com/use-esri-gis-and-your-data-beco...

hackuser 10y ago

I love text editors, especially Vim. However, I realize we no longer are tied to paper or use low-power, low-bandwidth computers. Images, still and moving, effectively are as easily handled by the computing platform as words. I believe the reason humans have used text so much more than images so far is that never before in history have we had a platform that efficiently handles multimedia. I need to effectively express myself using images; you can see people naturally doing that for casual purposes with Snapchat, etc.[0] But even with my eyes opened and my willingness to move forward, I'm limited by available tools. There is no productivity tool that a user can use to efficiently process mixed text and image (and audio). We need a Vim for multimedia, or at least a Word. [0] Yes, text is still a great tool, but it's not the best tool for every job.

irickt 10y ago

Here's a web version of the document: http://plain-text.co http://plain-text.co

austinjp 10y ago

This isn't working for me on mobile, gives a failed download of 0kb. If as irickt says this refers to http://plain-text.co http://plain-text.co then I'd say I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. Leverage the tools that are battle tested: plain text and version control. Of course, it's an uphill battle. If your boss expects to add track-change comments to a Word .docx then your pristine text-based processes are going to get tarnished. Personally I've been experimenting with github.com + gitbook.com for generation of book-like documents. I tried a hand-rolled toolchain based around pandoc but realised that i could write plugins for gitbook, with far more reliability. I'll have reached the holy grail when editors submit pull requests instead of track-changes Word docs attached to emails. I expect this to never happen.