A study of how Digital Humanists use GitHub, conducted by Lisa Spiro and Sean Morey Smith, found that a wide range of users, including professors, research staff, graduate students, IT staff, and librarians commonly used the site in their DH work. They used GitHub for a diverse range of activities, such as:
- Developing software
- Sharing data sets
- Creating websites
- Writing articles and books
- Collating online resources
- Keeping research notes
- Hosting syllabi and course materials
Participants in the study said they found GitHub useful in their Digital Humanities work for several reasons. In particular, it facilitated:
- Sharing and backing up files on multiple computers
- Monitoring changes effectively
- Recovering from bugs or errors by going back in time before the error arose
- Using different branches for experiments and new directions
- Sharing and managing files with others—seeing who added what content and when
As you can see across these sessions, we use GitHub to host workshop curricula. Hosting sessions on GitHub allows you (and anyone else interested in these topics!) to follow our repositories, and create your own version of the workshop based on our materials. This fosters open scholarship and knowledge sharing. It also facilitates attribution and citation by clearly tracking which content was created by whom, when it was added, and which projects or materials are derived from others.
If you look just under the workshop title, DHRI-Curriculum/git at the top of this page, you can see it is forked from pswee001/Git_DRI_Jan_2018. That line shows that this particular repository is building on ("forked from") the curriculum for a session I presented at our January 2018 Institute. If you then look at that repository, you will see that it is in turn forked from previous sessions that were developed by other GC Digital Fellows for workshops in past years.
Some of us use Git to track changes (version control in Git parlance) in writing projects, and find it to be a cleaner, more elegant solution than the Track Changes functionality in Microsoft Word.
I personally have had Word crash and sections of an article lost, when I was collaborating on a large writing project with co-authors who were using different versions of Word. If we had tracked our revisions using Git, the previous versions of the paper would always be saved and changes documented in case we wanted to return to an idea from an earlier draft, or a section that reviewer 3 really wants to see included in the discussion but was cut for space.
Have you ever had a folder full of multiple and conflicting versions of documents that looked like this?
|
--Documents
|
--syllabus.doc
--syllabus2.doc
--syllabusnew.doc
--syllabusRevised.doc
--syllabusFINAL.doc
--syllabus?.doc
Many of us borrow and adapt from syllabi that colleagues have shared with us. For example, when I first taught, I was offered syllabi by colleagues who had taught the course before. I used some of their work as a base to build my particular course, and after developing my own syllabi, I happily emailed them to other graduate students teaching for the first time.
This common and collegial practice has some challenges, however. As my colleagues and I emailed around Word documents, it became difficult to identify who had created which assignments or language, and we rarely got to see how others developed innovative approaches that would be useful in our own classes.
If my colleagues and I had instead forked our syllabi from each other's repositories on GitHub, our individual work would be attributed, and we could follow each other's revisions and additions to better revise our own. I could also easily trace forked repositories back to syllabi from previous semesters and dig up that classic or obscure reading that I wanted to reincorporate into the course.
Later in this workshop, you will create your own syllabus, track different versions of it, and replicate ("push") your local version to GitHub. With luck, this will give you a sense of how some of the above workflows might work in practice.