«

»

Oct 20 2011

Life and Scholarship in Plain Text

I’ve never met a person who liked Microsoft Word. Maybe I’ll meet that person this weekend, but I doubt it. Here is what Stephen Ramsay has to say about writing tools: “I don’t hear many people say that they love Word; people routinely say that they love Vim, Emacs, Scrivener, TextWrangler, and a few other high-performance writing tools.” That’s been my experience too.

I’d like to propose a session to talk about how to do scholarship in plain text. We can talk about syntaxes like Markdown and LaTeX, text editors like TextMate, TextWrangler, Vim, etc., tools like Pandox and pdftk, and best practices, such as how to collaborate with people who don’t use plain text.

About the author

Lincoln Mullen

Lincoln Mullen is an assistant professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University.

Permanent link to this article: http://newengland2011.thatcamp.org/10/20/life-and-scholarship-in-plain-text/

2 comments

1 ping

  1. Jamie Jungmin Yoo

    it might be rather off topic, but i’d also love to learn/talk more about note-taking method as well. how do you guys manage/organize your papers, articles, reading notes, etc? headache…

  2. Elli Mylonas

    This is a neat session Lincoln. We are all devoted to and shaped by our editors. I’m sure that vi users don’t solve problems the same way emacs users do! And also, what about moving in plain text from one tool to another depending on what you need to do?

    Jamie:
    ProfHacker (chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/ ) has some great posts on note taking, annotation, bibliography and other activities.

  1. » I Am Not Teaching on an Island Musings of One Educator

    […] more sessions were proposed; more from other DH beginners. Sessions on Writing with DH Tools and Life & Scholarship in Plain Text  intrigued me. I felt that I would go and see what I could get out of it… I was sure one of […]

Comments have been disabled.

Skip to toolbar