Over the past few months I have been thinking a great deal about how to incorporate all this new knowledge about digital methodology, data science, data analytics, (scholarly and non-scholarly) work/writing in the “digital” era into the way I do things as a scholar, teacher, thinker, etc. One of the key people that has been really informative for me has been Jonathan Reeve over at Columbia University. One of his posts from earlier this year, “Rethinking the MLA Style Research Paper” was incredibly generative for me—and it nicely dovetailed with some work my Departmental colleagues have been doing on thinking about writing at our university (a project generously funded by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation). In addition, I’ve been spending a good deal of time with Scott Selisker’s wonderful post about the use of plain text writing in academic workflows—I’ve learned how to incorporate Pandoc and even used Selisker’s workflow suggestions to compose my department’s assessment report from last year. I think it’s just a tad bit frightening to think about how I did things before all this new knowledge. There is an enormous power to working either with plain text or writing everything in Markdown and then converting said text into all kinds of different formats via Pandoc. This is not even to mention the ways in which this workflow makes it incredibly easy to incorporate code into the writing—which, of course, prior to very recently, I never had anything to do with—now I feel as if I’ve got a vast new area of knowledge to explore and discover. Terribly exciting and exhilarating.

Here in this post what I’m hoping to do—admittedly incredibly modest—is combine Reeve’s repository for the aforementioned “Rethinking” post along with utilizing the .css from Dave Liepmann, which attempts to fashion a style derived from the work of Edward Tufte, especially the really fantastic stuff found in his The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. We’ll see how it goes!

I should also mention a couple of the other places that were helpful:

  1. “Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown” by Dennis Tenen and Grant Wythoff over at the Programming Historian was a really nice start for me. I haven’t gotten a chance to go through Tenen’s Plain Text: The Poetics of Composition yet, but I am looking forward to that.
  2. Mort Yao’s “Boilerplating Pandoc for Academic Writing” was also very useful as I was futzing around with using Pandoc to convert my assessment report from Markdown into .pdf format.