Digifesto

I’ve found a vehicle for working on the Dissertron through the website of the course I’ll be co-teaching this Fall on Open Collaboration and Peer Production.

In the end, I went with Pelican, not Hyde. It was a difficult decision (because I did like the idea of supporting an open source project coming out of Chennai, especially after reading Coding Places. But I had it on good authority that Pelican was more featureful with cleaner code. So here I am.

The features I have in mind are crystalizing as I explore the landscape of existing tools more. This is my new list:

• Automatically include academic metadata on each Dissertron page so it’s easy to slurp it into Zotero.
• Include the Hypothes.is widget for annotations. I think Hypothes.is will be better for commenting that Disqus because it does annotations in-line, as opposed to comments in the footer. It also uses the emerging W3C Open Annotation standard. I’d like this to be as standards based as possible.
• Use citeproc-js to render citations in the browser cleanly. I think this handles the issue of in-line linked academic citations without requiring a lot of manual work. The citeproc-js looks like it’s come out of Zotero as well. Since Elsevier bought Mendeley, Zotero seems like the more reliable ally to pick for independent scholarship.
• Trickiest is going to be porting a lot of features from jekyll-scholar into a Pelican plug-in. I really want jekyll-scholar‘s bibliographic management. But I’m a little worried that Pelican isn’t well-designed for that sort of flexibility in theming. More soon.
• I’m interested in trying to get the HTML output of Dissertron as close as possible to emerging de facto standards on what on-line scholarship is like. I’ve asked about what PLOS ONE does about this. The answer sounds way complicated: a tool chain the goes from Latex to Word Docs to NLM 3.0 XML (which I didn’t even know was a thing), and at last into HTML. I’m trying to start from Markdown because I think it’s a simple markup language for the future, but I’m not deep enough in that tool chain to understand how to replicate its idiosyncracies.

If I could have all these nice things, and maybe a pony, then I would be happy and have no more excuses for not actually doing research, as opposed to obsessing about the tooling around independent publishing.