collection of code used as part of my dissertation
This repository has marks of several iterations of the dissertation and now also hosts my personal/professional website.
Version 1 I initially built the dissertation with Evernote connected to pistachio as the web front end, using a disqus engine for community commenting. See Version 1
Version 2 I translated the evernote/pistachio writing i did (without the community comments) into quip so my committee could engage in private. I don't have this interface active anymore.
Version 3 I started over, basically, writing in markdown using Sublime as my text editing environment and then using pandoc to convert drafts of chapters to Word to share with the committee. These are in the bai_markdown directory of this repo.
Version 3a Once I needed to begin stitching the chapters together, I did a final pandoc translation to Word and then combined the chapters into one large doc to deal with pagination, margins, TOC, etc. These are in the bai_print directory.
Version 3b The combined Word doc was saved as a PDF to be submitted as a print artifact for defense and publishing
The different materialities of each version have shaped the project in particular ways, but I would like to move back toward a digital ecosystem for the project, incorporating some of the work and changes made once moving to a predominantly print environment. Yet, if I am going to materially translate this PDF back toward a different set of interfaces, what might those interfaces afford that would change the project yet again?
I would like to offer a collaborative challenge to us - What would be a useful translation of the print dissertation that I had to produce and submit BACK into a digital ecosystem that would afford high surface area, collaboration, and anarchy?
- pandoc from pdf into markdown or from word into markdown?
- How would it make sense to break up the longer work into web appropriate chunks?
- How should footnotes be handled in a web interface?
- Are there interesting visualizations i could generate that would help people read/participate in the work?
- Are there NLP tasks that might shed light on the corpus that became a book, such as abstraction or extraction or linkage or...?
- What are the values of writing in Markdown?
- Is it worth assuming all writing done in jupyter notebooks or better to have a repository approach that may have notebooks and simpler markdown files and such?
- If we use a git type version control for writing, how could we facilitate reader/faculty engagement and commenting? Use Issues? Use Pull Requests? Use branches for versions?
- Would it be better to break text into 1 sentence per line for easier tracking of revisions and such?
- Is it useful for writers to make early drafts available to public or private online community for engagement? How best do that?