Plain text in academia
From plain-text.coI have made no secret in the past about my stance on the use of plaintext in academia: we need more of it. Enough with proprietary formats like Word; surely academics can learn to use Emacs iA Writer or BBEdit or something of the sort with Git and Pandoc.
Duke’s Kieran Healy has an excellent guide for social scientists to work in plaintext using just these tools. Although a bit outdated (just a bit e.g. --citeproc now exists and Sublime text 3 is in the past now) it is still a terrific, all-round introduction to getting started with plaintext.
Some version of this, tailored to specific courses of course, should be standard reading for new students at university. I am not a social scientist myself but it is hard to see how the case this book (website?) makes is not compelling for all disciplines.
This is a note: a brief thought or notable piece of information from my commonplace book. For longer writings, please see ‘Essays’.