[[Knowledge Management]], [[Reproducible [[Social [[Science]]]]]], and [[Academic Workflow]]s – 100 Tweets for @threadapalooza 2020, let's go
#roamcult #𐃏
1/100

Pandoc is a magical piece of software, and if you're not using it for your academic writing you're missing out. Compile (basically) any document format to (basically) any other document format.
2/100
While Pandoc is fantastic, it's a bit like ffmpeg: extremely powerful, but without GUI apps too few people will use it. ffmpeg has a ton of GUI apps that basically just wrap the CLI, Pandoc doesn't have enough of them.
3/100
Citekeys + CSL files + Pandoc can easily cut ~10+ hours from your writing workflow. Citekeys come from LaTeX-Land, you can use them through Pandoc with anything. And CSL files make it super easy to switch citation styles.
4/100
Since many journals have their own version of popular formats, every journal should be required to publish a CSL file, LaTeX and Word Pandoc template ready for submission. I don't want to think about the collective hours wasted formatting stuff for submission.
5/100
Why Pandoc you ask? The one true document format are text files. Lindy effect - they've been around from the beginning, they will be around until the end. Everything else can be created from them – so write your stuff in text files, then use Pandoc.
6/100
"That contradicts your devotion to @RoamResearch!" Yeah, no. If Roam had shitty plain-text export like Evernote, sure. But I can get stuff easily as Markdown (plain text), so I lose nothing and gain a world of features. Use Roam, export to Markdown, publish w/ Pandoc.
7/100
Citekeys are powerful because they are unique ids for whole papers. And unlike DOIs they are _memorable_. citekey:doi = domain:ip
Think in terms of Roam, papers should have unique IDs for paragraphs, so I can do einstein1905movement/ASDJKSL to link to a specific paragraph
8/100
PDFs are a horrible format and should die in a fire. I don't know enough about document formats, but I know there are better ones out there that give the illusion of "uneditable" and that PDFs suck. But Lindy strikes again: we're stuck with them, I fear.
9/100
Talking about "permanence", I feel there's a lot of tension to be resolved around the question of "what do we actually know right now in this particular subfield"? The more we move to pre-prints and "public peer review", the less legible fields become, bc volume increases.
10/100
At least in the social sciences, there is way to much emphasis on "contributing to theory". I've received and seen others receive too much feedback along the lines of "this doesn't contribute much to theory". We need to falsify more, not introduce endless mods to theory.
11/100
Fun paper on that from International Relations
https://t.co/nZEKyxKGdq
12/100

More from Software

The Great Software Stagnation is real, but we have to understand it to fight it. The CAUSE of the TGSS is not "teh interwebs". The cause is the "direct manipulation" paradigm : the "worst idea in computer science" \1


Progress in CS comes from discovering ever more abstract and expressive languages to tell the computer to do something. But replacing "tell the computer to do something in language" with "do it yourself using these gestures" halts that progress. \2

Stagnation started in the 1970s after the first GUIs were invented. Every genre of software that gives users a "friendly" GUI interface, effectively freezes progress at that level of abstraction / expressivity. Because we can never abandon old direct manipulation metaphors \3

The 1990s were simply the point when most people in the world finally got access to a personal computer with a GUI. So that's where we see most of the ideas frozen. \4

It's no surprise that the improvements @jonathoda cites, that are still taking place are improvements in textual representation : \5

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I'm going to do two history threads on Ethiopia, one on its ancient history, one on its modern story (1800 to today). 🇪🇹

I'll begin with the ancient history ... and it goes way back. Because modern humans - and before that, the ancestors of humans - almost certainly originated in Ethiopia. 🇪🇹 (sub-thread):


The first likely historical reference to Ethiopia is ancient Egyptian records of trade expeditions to the "Land of Punt" in search of gold, ebony, ivory, incense, and wild animals, starting in c 2500 BC 🇪🇹


Ethiopians themselves believe that the Queen of Sheba, who visited Israel's King Solomon in the Bible (c 950 BC), came from Ethiopia (not Yemen, as others believe). Here she is meeting Solomon in a stain-glassed window in Addis Ababa's Holy Trinity Church. 🇪🇹


References to the Queen of Sheba are everywhere in Ethiopia. The national airline's frequent flier miles are even called "ShebaMiles". 🇪🇹