Lectures and Notes: the killer apps.

First lectures. With Markdown, I’m able to write my own notes and create a slide deck at the same time. An example will help. Here’s a snippet from my lecture notes on the memory of the Civil War:

# Abolitionist memory of the war.

*Image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/William-Tecumseh-Sherman.jpg* Caption: William Tecumseh Sherman

There's another set of people who aren't content to see it go: those who remembered the war as the period of national renewal, rebirth, and freedom. We remember World War II today as the "Good War," because we fought the Nazis and won.

But unlike WWII, Civil War actually changed the country for the better. It abolished slavery. It instituted amendments that guaranteed citizenship to every American. It promised equal protection under the law.

Memory that's particularly strong among African Americans.

They remember Sherman differently.
Sherman not as maurauder but as unfifilled promise.
Sheman, you might remember, when he finally made it to the sea issued his famous **Field Order 15**

With some ancillary code I wrote, that does two things at once: builds a slide showing the wikimedia copy of Sherman’s grizzled mug, and creates a set of notes for me under the header “Abolitionist memory of the war” to go on the paper notes I’ll read from.

Later on, I’ll write another script that will find pull every phrase in boldface (like “Field Order 15”) from all my notes and put them onto a list of possible IDs for the midterm I can hand out. Another script could strip just the section headers and print out outlines for the lectures to hand out before class.

This is writing documents for multiple uses, and it can be incredibly useful. If, two minutes before class, I decide I want to switch the order I talk about the abolitionist memory of the war and the white supremacist memory of the war, I can just cut and paste the chunks of text, and all the slides associated with each will have their order switched.

Something like this could provide a really useful way to integrate and share resources, and free up some of the tedium with prepping lectures. But:

• That syntax for including an image as a slide is my own, not standard Markdown. I’ve defined scripts for dropping in YouTube videos, images, captions, and some other predefined formats: but it would take a lot of work to define a set of them that make sense for anyone but me.

• There are a lot of standards out there for working with HTML slides. None is winning, in part because none is anywhere as good as Keynote or Powerpoint for the average user. My code works with deck.js, one of the only HTML formats not supported by Pandoc; but there’s no obvious other standard to switch to.

• Constructing slides that are more complicated than a single image with a title, or a numbered list, requires some serious HTML/CSS expertise. My scripts support that, but not in a pretty way.

Modern HTML allows some beautiful things: I can easily imagine a GUI for one of the standards that would make it easy to create slides for re-use in one of the competing platforms. But I think the standards are still evolving too rapidly in this sphere to make the way forward obvious.

Pull out the slide deck, and you still might have a useful tool here: something that generates a lecture notes for me, outlines for the students/course web page, and IDs for the test prep sessions. But I think there’s something even more valuable possible for archive notes.

Markdown is a great language for taking archival notes. Archives are all about hierarchy: and Markdown easily lets you tag mutliple levels of headers (Series, Box, Collection, file…). But so is Microsoft Word: and there are plenty of outlining programs out there that are even better.

There are a few things that Markdown notes might do more easily than normal ones. Build a good enough web interface, and you could even click on a photo or quote in your notes and instantly get back a string that ascends the various headers to tell you where it is: Series 3a, Box 13, Folder 4, Letter on 4/18. But the place where there’s really an opportunity lies in Digital Photos.

Digital cameras have completely changed historians’ relations to archives in the last 15 years. (That is, in the subset of archives where cameras are allowed). We used to take notes: now, a massive part of our archival practice involves taking pictures, which have to be sorted through on our return.

When I’m wading through boxes, I tend to type the name of the box, and then some information about each folder followed by descriptions of the documents: if it’s especially useful or especially visual, I take a picture (or a series of several pictures). I think this is pretty similar to what most people do. It means that I end up with two separate timelines to sort through when I get home. 1) A bunch of textual notes that contain my impressions of the works and the rationales for why I copied them and what they are. 2) A stream of pictures with little context but their order to patch together their origin, sometimes with a close-up of a box or folder label thrown in to help.

The tough question is: how can you insert pictures into your notes? Unless you want to physically pick up your laptop and use the webcam for your pictures, it’s not obvious what the best way would be. And if you try to put more than a couple pictures into a Word document, it will crash right away.

Unlike the systems most historians use for notes, Markdown is plain text and has an easy method for inserting multimedia. That means that you can use it to integrate your archival photos directly into your notes; and that unlike Word, it can handle hundreds of images or thumbnails with aplomb.

The last challenge is knowing which parts of your notes go with which pictures. This is a surprisingly hard thing to solve: but there’s an existing answer in a second technology much beloved by the technology industry: version control.

Version control can get complicated, but in its simplest form it’s much like a wikipedia edit history: not just the current state of a file, but every previous revision is stored in memory.

So for archival notes, we just need to save the state of your archival notes every 10 or 15 seconds; match those markers against the timestamps of the photos from a digital camera; and insert the pictures into the text just in place.

When you want to review your notes, you just open them up in HTML format: thumbnails of every picture will appear in place, and you can click on them to get the full version.

For the technically savvy, I’ve put a set of scripts online that do just this. I use gitit to view the notes themselves so I can interlink between pages. A daemon handles the git commits: but that only works because I have always been a compulsive, several-times-a-minute saver of my documents.

What would a user-friendly platform look like?

Puts Pandoc, Git, and a good Markdown editor on your computer at once.

This should resemble existing note taking as closely as possible: the user will need to make sure their camera’s clock is well-calibrated, but other than that it should look only like using a new text editor.

Whenever you type in the editor, it saves the files and runs git commit at close intervals. (Git experts may find the idea of automatic commits without a clear commit message cringe-inducing. Insofar as they have a point, edits should probably take place on a separate branch that is forked back into the main one periodically.)

Imports photos from an sdcard or photo library, finds the version control files and matches photo times against them, and builds an html file for each document of notes.

Some of the technical components are obvious. I can’t imagine using anything other than git for version control; and though I use gitit to view files, I think that standalone html files are the only sensible way for most people to view their files. The scripting language for step three, as well, isn’t very important: I’ve used python, but anything with a set of hooks into git.

The big question is: what’s the text editor to be? I use emacs, and get the impression that most people writing in Markdown are using vim. Both of these are clearly bad choices for the ordinary historian. For all that Markdown can be written in any editor, the writing function also must support auto-save and auto-git-commit, so anything without a scripting interface is out. SublimeText has its selling points, but free’s probably the way to go.

That means, unless I’m missing a central player in the ecosystem, that the natural choice is the new Atom editor from Github. But perhaps there’s a more lightweight alternative?

Platform will also be an issue. The Mac is the obvious platform to capture a majority of historians: but a surprising number of people seem to take their notes with an iPad-keyboard array, which would call the whole stack into question.

Infrastructure