WA 2016 Week 17: Research Notebook is Go!

Weekly Whaaa…?

Having kicked the idea around for a while, I finally took a couple evenings to work out how I’ll attempt an Open Humanities Research Notebook. Behold: it lives!

As I say over there, I realized that I often feel a need to wrap posts up tidily here somehow. Perhaps that’s a lingering impulse from my days as a high school newspaper editor? In any case, I’d like a place for things that are very obviously “in process,” and it seems like things here stand a good chance of being confused for Studied Opinions rather than Thoughts in Process. Plus, having a research notebook that lives in a different instance of Jekyll means that the tags of the two blogs won’t speak to each other. At the moment this seems like a good thing, but we’ll see how it plays out.

I reserve the right to eventually just fold it all back into this main site. That’s one of the many nice things about blogging with Jekyll and Markdown—since I settled on using the same theme for both, I’d just have to do some simple “find and replace in project” action in my text editor of choice¹ and merging the two should only take 15 minutes at most.

The first night consisted of me trying to figure out how I’d likely use the separate site and looking for themes to visually distinguish it from this one, my main site and blog. I knew I wanted a darker theme so it’d be distinctly different from this site. I also tend to use dark themes in my text editors, so it’ll trick my brain into thinking that things-in-process live there, even when it’s published and open for others to see. So I ended up finding BlackDoc, a very promising theme that looks a lot like nvALT’s interface, and starting off with it.

But once I started trying to use dummy entries with tags, I finally realized that BlackDoc doesn’t have tag logic built into it…and that I didn’t want to spend more than the 30 minutes or so I’d already spent on trying to make tags happen. So I instead took the path of made another version of the same theme I use with this site, and chose colors from the Atom theme I’ve been using: Burodeper’s Minimal Syntax Dark. So far I’m definitely content with it.

For the foreseeable future, I’ll put my reading notes and other research stuff over there. I may also put up working drafts of my public talks or other papers as I see fit. I’ll probably also link to what I do over there in these weekly assemblage posts, just to help make sure that the two speak to each other.

1. Currently Atom, which I definitely recommend. ↩