Plain Plain Text (Planning)

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

Getting Started

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.

Links that inspire

• 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)