How do we stop academics from distributing their LaTeX as pdf, because it's hurting the world? i.e. how do we get...
Posted by Michael E Karpeles on Friday, November 13, 2015
The Next Generation of Academic Publishing.If we could get every computer scientist and mathematician to stop using...
Posted by Michael E Karpeles on Friday, May 8, 2015
An Ecosystem for Literate Research Request for Comments: ? Status of this Memo This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.Status of this Memo Abstract The idea of implementing org-mode (as a rending environment) as opposed to html and allowing web "resources" to execute each other as modules. I am imagining a "living" (interactive, evolving), connected web ecosystem for literate, reproducible research/programming which allows native programmatic interop/intercommunication between resources, modular and reusable components. For example, imagine being in a (webpage) resource and clicking a block to execute its underlying routine / dependencies (run within the rcontext of your client or perhaps the resource optoinally provides/points to a VM for this purpose). Trying an alternative approach to an existing "research paper" could be as simple as forking or linking to their "resource" (perhaps each resource has a git repo associated with it at some special endpoint determined by an RFC) and inheriting the programmatic qualities of their org-mode document for free. The easiest solution (which would be helpful all to... maybe 100 people) is an emacs org-browser mode (which uses org-mode but allows navigation of or between networked org-mode documents) and uses the native OS as the environment (as opposed to browser client) for computation (which makes more sense). The whole thing is fuzzy and just proof of concept, not genuinely a recommendation of a specific implementation. The first step is to follow in the footprints of Bashky et al. in "EXPOSURE TO IDEOLOGICALLY DIVERSE NEWS AND OPINION ON FACEBOOK" by organizing, maintaining, and releasing all the components and resources used to reproducibly achieve their results. https://solomonmessing.wordpress.com/2015/05/24/exposure-to-ideologically-diverse-news-and-opinion-future-research/ https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi%3A10.7910%2FDVN%2FLDJ7MS The next step towards achieving reproducible research is by providing a different compiler than LaTeX and requiring minimal change to author's existing flow and markup process. Authors should remain researches and not spend the majority of their time formatting. I think the way this can be made mainstream (steppable, reproducible, and interactive research) while not causing additional work to the authors, would be to provide some sort of replacement compiler to LaTeX which is able to generate both a static paper as well as a rich step-through-able web page which can be executed sequentially and piece wise (like mathematica) using a backend like http://sandstorm.io or http://terminal.io. Of course the paper could also have interactive graphics, similar to the one included in thumbnail, which can be generated using default d3-like templates (without requiring programming/markup beyond what is already required for LaTeX. Ahmed El-Hassany This idea reminds me of the work of Richard Taylor's group at UC Irvine: here is one paper and you can easily track the others on their website http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2048147.2048202&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE&hc_location=ufi