WE1S Workshop on Markdown & Github

Friday Jan. 26, 2018, 12:30-3:30pm, South Hall 2509

The Mellon Foundation funded WhatEvery1Says project at UCSB (WE1S) will be holding the first in its series of workshops open to the UCSB community on Markdown & Github: First Steps Toward learning Modern Digital Practices for Sustainable and Shareable Research.

• Markdown is a plain text format for writing structured documents. First developed in 2004, Markdown is gaining in popularity because it is easy to write and read, as well as to create consistent formatting that can be rendered in a wide variety of formats and environments, including GitHub.

• GitHub is a Web-based document and code repository hosting service that provides extensive version control functions and features designed for collaboration. Widely used for computer code, GitHub is becoming increasingly popular with humanities scholars needing these features, and even for hosting blogs and websites.

Across the disciplines, including in the social sciences and humanities, researchers are using these tools to create research environments that enable the maintenance of stable, easy-to-migrate documents, the clear versioning of their work, and the ability to contribute to and draw from shared-project resources.

Scott Kleinman, one of the WE1S project’s PIs, will lead the workshop. A professor of English at California State University, Northridge, Kleinman is also project lead for the Lexomics project, which produces the online text-analysis tool Lexos.

The workshop is geared for beginners, including students and faculty. It will also serve the purpose of helping to train some of WE1S’s research assistants in methods used by the project.

The live stream of the workshop and all workshop resources are available at https://whatevery1says.github.io/workshops/markdown-and-github/index.html.