Plain Plain Text is an initiative by Research Data Services at Columbia University Libraries.
Mission: Facilitating and propagating the use of plain text methods and/or standards in the acquisition, analysis, management, licensing, and dissemination of scholarly knowledge.
More concretely, we aim to have answers when people ask the following questions:
- I want to write a handsome research paper
- I want to create a modular CV that is both online and a pdf
- I want to create a personal home page
- I want to create an online image archive
- I want to create a handsome conference or workshop website
- I want to simplify the formats my data use
- I want to manage my data in way that follows FAIR conventions
- I want to edit and distribute an academic journal
- I want to license my work so that it can be broadly used
Very little is implemented, but the idea is that a user should be able to download a script/binary (much like with Homebrew) that puts itself in the user’s $PATH
and allows for commands like:
simple new essay
simple new cv
simple typeset
simple publish
As such, the installer would check for Pandoc, etc., and install templates into the Pandoc data folder (~/.local/share/pandoc/
on a Mac). This is the simple-pandoc-data
repo.
The new
command would call up GitHub and clone an initial repository, like ember new
or gatsby new
.
As such, repos like simple-essay
have only content in them; templating is pushed to the data files.
- The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science (Kieran Healy)
- Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown (Dennis Tenen and Grant Wythoff)
- A Plain Text Workflow for Academic Writing with Atom (Scott Selisker)
- Minimal Computing Homepage
- Nimble Tents Homepage
- Building a Static Website with Jekyll and GitHub Pages (Amanda Visconti)
- our work-flow
- Introduction to Plain Text Workflows and Sustainable Publishing (Till Gralert)