I am teaching “Media History of New York” in Spring 2018 in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communications at NYU.
This repository is an attempt to generate both a handsome webpage and a handsome pdf of the syllabus at the same time with Markdown. This is (not) surprisingly rather tricky. However, this is also a template for future syllabi, and I encourage others to tweak this work.
Though this syllabus is a fork of my English 101 syllabus, for 2018 I have made some radical changes.
Most notably, I am no longer using MultiMarkdown to process the syllabus, choosing, instead, to use Pandoc. This is part of a larger process of moving towards Pandoc because I’ve come to understand a lot of the templating more easily than with MultiMarkdown.
The syllabus relies, first and foremost, on the file metadata.yml, which
tells Pandoc where to find the source files, what order to put them in, and
which templates to use when creating pdfs and htmls. It also relies on a
BibTeX file (bib.bib) to generate the bibliographies at the end of each
document.
The meat of the syllabus is in the sections/ folder, and that leaves
process.rb, a ruby script that reads the metadata, compiles the documents
with Pandoc, and puts them in the right place for a quick stage-commit-push to
GitHub.
git clone https://github.com/muziejus/media-history-of-nyc.git
cd media-history-of-nyc
ruby process.rb
This assumes you have Pandoc already installed. And, probably, LaTeX.
As noted above, this is a large reworking of a previous syllabus for a course I taught at NYU, “English 101” which was itself, a large reworking of “Does It Work?” from autumn 2016.
Teaching in MCC is a new step for me, and I borrowed a lot of ideas for this syllabus from my colleague in the English Dept., Blevin Shelnutt, who taught this course earlier. Her syllabus, coupled with rereading Shannon Mattern’s short Deep Mapping the Media City sort of made the course fall together on their own.
In order to get the syllabus to sound “NYUish,” I copied (sometimes very heavily) from a syllabus prepared by my colleague at NYU, Jini Watson. She was also helpful in giving me a sense of what kinds of assignments and homework students could expect at this university. Useful info for someone who’s not taught in a US context in over half a decade!
The bravery to create a LaTeX syllabus was fueled by Kieran Healy’s custom
LaTeX templates. I’ve greatly
simplified his setup, however. And Dennis Tenen
helped me with figuring out my Pandoc babysteps.
This structure of this GitHub syllabus was once based on Mark Sample's Videogame Studies syllabus, in how it is presented on GitHub.
If you would like to know more about GitHub and syllabi, here are a few ProfHacker articles:
- Forking Your Syllabus (22 March 2012)
- How to Fork a Syllabus on GitHub (12 April 2012)
- Git a Fork in My Syllabus, It’s Done (5 June 2012)
Media History of NYC by Moacir P. de Sá Pereira is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/