I started this MOOC a few days ago (18/03) and this is my first day tackling
any of the practical exercises.
I've been using VCS for many years, mostly github and a bit of self-hosted git,
and rarely collaboratively.
You *can* teach an old dog new tricks, and it's interesting to get some new
perspectives on otherwise familiar tools.
## Thoughts/Musings
- Some of the exercises in module 1 are posed quite ambiguously;
- I'm looking forward to getting to the part about org-mode;
- I've been meaning to cultivate a proper note-taking system/personal
knowledge-base for a couple of years, since I first became aware of
Obsidian.
- I really didn't know that scholars were using using XML (well, TEI) to make
linguistic/historical/literary annotations, but, well, that makes sense.
## Interesting links
-[Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown](https://programminghistorian.org/en/lessons/sustainable-authorship-in-plain-text-using-pandoc-and-markdown)
I genuinely had no idea about Pandoc prior to this MOOC, and converting from
markdown to PDF is pretty cool.
Despite years working with markdown for READMEs and documentation, I didn't know
that one can add a YAML metadata block to the top of a markdown file.
I recently learnt about markdown footnotes, but I didn't know you could cite
entries in a .bib file.
Typora supports shorthand links, e.g. `<https://fun-mooc.fr/>`; I wonder whether
other platforms do too; let's give it a try: <https://fun-mooc.fr/>
-[The Measure of All Things](https://www.amazon.fr/Measure-All-Things-Seven-Year-Transformed/dp/0743216768)
Who would've thought that a book about white dudes on ships (presumably
measuring stuff) would be held in such high esteem?
-[Maintaining a laboratory notebook](https://colinpurrington.com/tips/lab-notebooks/)
Colin Purrington's guide is pretty rad.
Probably a bit too hard-science to be of relevance to my work, but you never
know.
If I can incorporate even 25% of the rigour that's described there into my own
practice, I'll be in a much better place than I have been to-date.
-[Transcribing medieval manuscripts with TEI](https://andrewdunning.ca/transcribing-medieval-manuscripts-tei)
(See above.)
Chances are I'll never (need to) use TEI, but I'm into it.
## Some software I wasn't previously aware of
### Pandoc
Markdown to PDF? To HTML? With metadata-awareness? Yes please.
One issue... Pandoc doesn't appear to like display-math blocks containing
nested environments, e.g.
```markdown
$$
\begin{align}
e^{i\pi} = -1
\end{align}
$$
```
GitHub doesn't appear to have a problem with that sort of action.
What about GitLab?..
$$
\begin{align}
e^{i\pi} = -1
\end{align}
$$
### DocFetcher
Not sure I'll use it, but then again there have been various times when I've had
to resort to trying `find` or `locate` at the (Mac) command line, and it's been
painful.
### ExifTool
Perhaps I *should* be adding metadata to my images and audio files.
