The problem of the war machine, or the firing squad: is a general necessary for n individuals to manage to fire in unison?

Our applications for dissertation fellowships are due at the end of February, which means that I’ve had my sole chapter on the mind quite a bit lately, even while wasting most of yesterday playing Doodle Jump. So it was excellent timing that Ryan Cordell should come out with his post on using Cultured Code‘s Things to help manage tasks over at Profhacker earlier this week. Putting together a dissertation is such a crazy project with pieces all over the place, that I feel that it’s necessary to rely on some sort of software tools just to save on redundancy.¹

Anyway, Ryan makes the case for using Things as the general to get the firing squad to shoot in unison, the dissertation being both rhizome and a tree. But more precisely, his post is pretty excellent, because it provides a lot of use scenarios specific to academics–the sorts of scenarios that are completely obvious, but only in hindsight. Making a task with a deadline from an emailed CFP? Duh! Yet I had never thought of doing that, myself. Mostly, however, the post reminded me that not only had I spent a considerable chunk of change on Things, but that adding tasks can be done via the quick-entry popup in any application, a popup that includes references to the url you were looking at when you summoned it!

See, over the past half year or so, Things had become nothing more than the repository of the list of movies I wanted to see along with reasons why I wanted to see them. My inbox, instead, became my to-do list. This is suboptimal for three main reasons: first, even with Gmail labels, it’s hard to distinguish tasks from each other or see how some might actually be related. Second, an email won’t tell you when the deadline has passed. And, third, and most important, your inbox is constantly getting augmented by stuff that isn’t necessarily tasks, meaning that it is an unnatural blend of to-do list and, well, inbox. And that’s a mess.

So Ryan’s piece encouraged me to trim my inbox down to just four emails as well as separate out into discrete tasks the long lists I emailed myself about things I needed to do (read or think about) for my dissertation. Now, in Things, I can order them, group them, etc. And most importantly, I feel like I have some control over the process of thinking about a dissertation again.

Things is not perfect. Sharing the task database using Dropbox is rather risky. Further, syncing with the iPhone is a pain: it doesn’t sync when cradled–one has to open Things on the iPhone while it’s also running on a computer and both are on the same subnet. But why would I ever launch the Things app on my phone when it’s on the same subnet as my computer? If we’re on the same subnet, that means I’m at my computer! It would also be nice, and this may be possible though I just don’t yet know how, if I could have stuff automatically get sorted into certain areas based on the tags I give; everything tagged “dissertation” should land in my “Dissertation” area. And, finally, I would love if I could sync Things with Gcal, as right now I’m sometimes torn between putting something in Gcal and putting something in Things. Usually I opt for the calendar if the stuff is date-specific.²

The standard caveats apply about task managers (and any organizational tools, including DevonThink): it’s only useful if you use it, and what’s useful for one might not be useful for another. But for the time being, I’m back!

1. My handwritten notes of ideas I get in bed or something, for example, are often very, very redundant. Software helps eliminate that duplicated work by showing one that it is duplicated work.
2. Apparently, the application can sync with iCal. I think I knew this, but there was something about the implementation that I did not like. Still, this means that I can most likely use iCal as a bridge to Gcal, but that has been messy in the past.

These sorts of projects engage in the creation of what Deleuze and Guattari call “tracing.” Against the tracing, they put the “map,” which is a rhizome:

What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency… The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification… [It has] multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight.

I imagine that the creators of these projects don’t see their work in this sort of negative way. Or, more importantly, they don’t care: they are creating intentionally pedagogical, not analytical, tools. That possibility makes me temper my own argument a bit, since I worry that I’m beating up on strawmen. For example, I still don’t know how to read the “too soon, far too soon” in considering GIS in one response to the Chronicle‘s interest in “Literary Geospaces.” But one way or another, These sorts of projects are the very tippity tip of the possibilities available in pushing forward an actual spatial turn away from the hegemony of history in the humanities. They acknowledge that space is important. The next step is unfreezing space.

What follows is an “annotated version” of the second part of a presentation I made this week on using GIS in the humanities (pptx | video), where I actually start talking about a GIS. All links open in new windows.

Simply put, a GIS is a system (the “S”) of information (the “I”) with a geographical (the “G”) component. We interact with a GIS whenever we ask Google Maps for driving directions: Maps interacts with a network GIS that figures out how to get from one point to another and then displays that information in our browser.

The most important conceptual idea to grasp of how a GIS is different from the various projects in the earlier part of the presentation is that we can ask a GIS a question and then get an answer. This could be driving directions, or it can get more detailed, like asking, “how are median ages distributed in the 60637 ZIP code, according to the 2000 Census?” or “what kinds of governments were in Latin America over the course of the 20th Century?” or “what is the relationship between the railroad and population distribution in industrial England?”

My own question in my workshop presentation was, “how can a study of the distribution of the various points mentioned by John Dos Passos in certain sections of the U.S.A. trilogy change our understanding of his representation of the US as ‘the speech of the people‘?”

The point here is that using a GIS can open analytic entryways into understanding an object of study. A GIS begins the engine of analysis, not stops it, as a flat map does, assertions about putting the reader into a text’s “imaginative landscape” notwithstanding.

U.S.A. trilogy vs. 1920 Census data. (click to enlarge)

Creating a GIS, though, is a rather tricky–or at least time-consuming–procedure. The first part is collecting data. For my project, I had data come from two sources. The first was the U.S.A. trilogy itself, where I hand-entered geographical observations and then geocoded them (using Google Earth as my gazetteer). I matched the geographical observations against US Census data from 1920, which I downloaded from the NHGIS site. NHGIS not only offers giant data tables (spreadsheets) with historical census data, it also provides historically accurate shapefiles for each census, which allow me to represent the census data spatially along with my observations about Dos Passos. One result of the comparison is something like this map here, which contrasts the distribution of sections of the trilogy with the US population as a whole.

What kind of conclusion is immediately apparent? Dos Passos created a much more widely dispersed US than the population data from the time would have dictated. This suggests that “speech of the people” wasn’t enough of the US for him–the geographic expanse of the US was also important in how he rebuilt a US in the trilogy, which then moves the ball further toward a larger, material claim I’m making about national imagining in the novel as a genre. This kind of conclusion would be rather impossible without the use of a GIS.

Once the hurdle of data entry is met, however, the next step is using software to interact with the data. In my talk, I mentioned GeoDa, which is a free, Windows-only geostatistical application. It’s very basic in its interface, but it can do quite a bit in comparing various variables and doing regressions on the variables. A neat little program. I also mentioned Quantum GIS, a far less exciting, but still free, piece of software. It’s less exciting mostly since qgis can’t do the sorts of statistical analyses that I would like my software to be able to do. Google Earth, of course, can also be used as something like a GIS, as shown in this movie by Matthew L. Jockers that shows the distribution of Irish-American novels’ plots (breathlessly reported by the Chronicle), but it does not have a lot of the analytical tools built in that GeoDa, qgis, or other programs do.

Once money gets on the table, ArcGIS becomes the sort of gold-standard for building a GIS, despite its amazingly frustrating interface. ArcGIS is useful to learn since it can do pretty much everything, and it is a good introduction to concepts surrounding GIS. I used ArcGIS to create the map above, for example. But it’s still annoying, expensive, and often completely illogical. At least the results it generates are decent.

At the University of Chicago, there is a small GIS community growing around a few classes about using GISes and a site license for the ArcGIS software. I myself am a part/product of that community, having taken the yearlong GIS course sequence offered by the Committee on Geographical Sciences. But beyond the relationship with the Oriental Institute, this sort of spatial connection has not permeated the Division of the Humanities. That’s too bad, but it might change.

Moving from my own academic setting back into using GISes in the humanities as a whole, it becomes clear quickly that there’s not terribly much out there, especially in fields connected with literary analysis. There are tentative first steps in the work of Moretti or Jockers, but beyond that it gets somehow far too connected to historical analysis–humanities GIS often piggybacks on historical GIS, even in my own work.

But if we keep Morettis words in mind:

A good map is worth a thousand words, cartographers say, and they are right: because it produces a thousand words: it raises doubts, ideas. It poses new questions and forces you to look for new answers.

We can crack open two new dimensions of analytical approach. That sounds exciting, since it is!

There were a few additional spatial links for the Humanities that I did not include in my presentation, but that I think could give possible avenues for future work.

• GIS & the Humanities from Stanford’s library page. I’m not surprised that two of the academics I’ve mentioned in this post are at Stanford and that they also have a straight up link for GIS and the humanities. Included is a neat little pdf that helps make the same kinds of claims I’m trying to make here.
• Mapping the Digital Humanities from HASTAC. This is a discussion that just began on mapping and the humanities. I don’t want to say too much about it.
• GIS for the Humanities from San Antonio College. I haven’t fully investigated this site.
• CrimeStat from the University of Michigan. Despite the name, CrimeStat can be used on any sort of point-based data (like events in a novel) to show deeper clustering and other relationships beyond what ArcGIS can do. It is free and Windows-only.

I often feel like I’m a few drinks behind the rest of the crowd when it comes to drinking the digital humanities Kool-Aid. This is kind of a problem, because a chunk of what I’m trying to do with my dissertation is necessarily using software, hardware, and datasets to try and interpret some things about US novels from the 1930s. I should feel, then, right at home in digihum projects, but for some reason… it’s still not quite clicking. Much of what I see online strikes me as amateurish, tentative, or unsatisfying–which, to be fair, also was the general consensus around the chapter I presented last week at the American Cultures Workshop at the University of Chicago.

But my friend Manan, who works for Humanities Computing at the University, asked me to present something broader about some of the techniques I used to produce my paper. This was a great opportunity to explain in more detail about what I see as a potential source of trouble (strawman alert) in some “digital” approaches to the humanities, which is the reliance on “flat maps” to push along arguments. So here’s my presentation:

If you want to download just the PowerPoint (don’t judge!), I’ve got it up here: GIS for the Humanities.

In this first part of the post, I’ll tackle the first 14 slides of the presentation, which demonstrate what flat maps look like, how some people are using flat maps in the humanities, and ways that one can do the same. I’m not categorically against this sort of work, I feel I have to repeat constantly. I just don’t think it’s as groundbreaking as it seems (like when the Chronicle writes about it).

Anyway, here is the sort of “annotated version” of the first part of the presentation. All links open in new windows.

Space is terribly important in researching the Humanities, though it has often taken a backseat to history. Foucault was asked about this by geographer editors of Hérodote, and his responses (translated in 1980 into English and available in Power/Knowledge) slowly force him into acknowledging this oversight (though Foucault was always somewhat spatial). Jameson, on the other hand, claims that space has become newly important as a result of postmodernism. Soja, then, takes these two areas as jumping off grounds for his own positing of a postmodern geography.

If space is important then, how do we, as researchers, interact with it?

One avenue is Neogeography, which is the sort of user-contributed, web-based, amateur generation of cartographic information. This includes things like Flickr maps, personal Google Maps, and even technology that relies on geographical information without generating maps, like Photosynth. Google has managed to corner the market on this sort of technology, by both opening up the Google Maps API (GPS-enabled pigeons help monitor pollution) and by creating Google Earth, which has launched neogeography into the stratosphere.

Google Earth has been already used to help situate literary works on the site GoogleLitTrips. Aimed at the kiddie market, the site distributes .kmz files that have geocoded locations from works of literature. But the maps depend on Google Earth’s often sloppy layout. Though one can jump from point to point, creating a “trip,” it’s not too terribly dynamic. A similar entry in this sort of thing is Gutenkarte, which was developed by, among other people, Schuyler Erle. Gutenkarte, however, is not much different from the literary atlases that J. G. Bartholomew compiled at the start of the 20th century–especially since it only maps works in the Public Domain! Eventually, the site promises, there will be more interactivity, but for now, it’s more an exercise in showing how powerful the MetaCarta GeoParser is.

A few steps farther down the development chain is the Map of Early Modern London, a  project undertaken up in Canada. Based on a 16th century map of London, it is an interactive tour de force of information about various locations in London, and the site “aims to recreate some of what [Editor Janelle] Jenstad calls ‘the imaginative landscape of the place,’ its ‘cultural geography.’” The unspecificity of this kind of language irritates me, since it does not seem to have any analytic force. Jenstad writes on the map’s site that she uses the map to show “the geographical relationship between the city and Renaissance theatres, to map out the routes of processions and pageants” and the like. That’s fine, but what, precisely, makes a “geographical relationship”? Is Jenstad using the human eye to detect these relationships? (famously unreliable!)

These sorts of projects have merit, of course. They’re providing an index, a point of reference. They’re telling you what you already know, except spatially. Or they’re telling you something you didn’t know, in more detail. This means they also provide context (both within the text and against the material world). They also–and here’s where something like “imaginative landscape” comes in–allow a sort of empathetic / sentimental entryway into a certain space of alterity that’s certainly useful for readers.

But in their attachment toward presenting a narrative spatially–flattening a narrative–they are not providing any real analysis or doing much different than what Bartholomew did besides adding interactivity. They are to Bartholomew as Encarta is to Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I adore maps in the beginnings of novels, for example, but they mostly serve no other purpose than to either get me excited about what will happen or help me keep various narrative balls in the air. They never tell me something new about the text itself. That may not be their point, but it also means that they aren’t useful as, say, a dissertation project. Nor do they demonstrate, in my opinion, quite enough dynamism to force the spatial turn away from having just history as the engine of analysis.

That’s what I mean when I call this sort of mapping “flat.” I don’t know where I got the term from. Likely suspects are Deleuze and Guattari, in which case “flat maps” are like their concepts of a “tracing,” but I may have gotten it from Moretti. They reproduce, they don’t provide new entryways. Yet often, that seems to be enough as far as people are concerned. The rhetorical flourish of a pretty map (one that I’ve made use of before) wows the audience, even if there’s no real there there.

If that’s ok, though, and one wants to make a flat map, I suggested using OpenStreetMaps instead of Google Maps. I also encouraged people to use the David Rumsey Collection‘s downloadable kmz to help situate spatial data among historical maps.

In the second part of this post, I’ll talk more about what a GIS is, and how I see its use in doing actual research and analysis in the humanities, instead of just creating reproductions.

The biggest irritation I had with the memoir class was that, for some reason, it was doublespacing my footnotes when I used the \DoubleSpacing command. I figured out how to stop that: I erased the line for \VerbatimFootnotes. I’m not sure why I enabled that command in the first place, but I certainly don’t need it for now. I also took advantage of the titlepage examples in memoir to spiff up my title a bit. I thought it was too big and started too far down the page.

I used the \vskip command to make a whitespace break in between thoughts. You call this command by typing something like this:

\vskip 20pt

It took me forever to get it to work, since I kept putting the measurement in either braces or brackets.

Furthermore, I made a few macros to speed up typing. For example,

\newcommand{\usa}{\textit{U.S.A.}}

made it so that I could just type \usa\ when referring to the trilogy by Dos Passos.

Further, I wanted a set of figures arranged in a table, but treated as separate figures (and numbered as such). The memoir manual helped here, and I basically had a 3×4 matrix that looked, per row, like this:


\begin{minipage}{0.3\textwidth}
\centering
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{\includegraphics{mac.png}}
\caption{Mac} \label{mac}
\end{minipage}
\hfill
\begin{minipage}{0.3\textwidth}
\centering
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{\includegraphics{janey.png}}
\caption{Janey} \label{janey}
\end{minipage}
\hfill
\begin{minipage}{0.3\textwidth}
\centering
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{\includegraphics{j-ward-moorehouse.png}}
\caption{J. W. Moorehouse} \label{moorehouse}
\end{minipage}
\newline


This was far easier than I expected it to be. The {!} means to auto-scale the graphic to fit the width while adjusting the vertical appropriately.

Finally, I had the yucky task of formatting part of The Big Money. It didn’t come out perfectly, as the \vinphantom is not working properly and the two instances of [{\ldots}] are misaligned, but here is the text I used:


\begin{quotation}\SingleSpacing
``Comrades, let's sing,'' Don's voice shouted. Mary forgot everything as her voice joined his voice, all their voices, the voices of the crowds being driven back across the bridge in singing:

\begin{center}{\itshape Arise ye prisoners of starvation {\ldots}}

\vskip 30pt

\Large {\itshape Newsreel LXVI}

\vskip 15pt

\normalsize HOLMES DENIES STAY

\vskip 10pt

{\itshape A better world's in birth}
\end{center}
Tiny Wasps Imported from Korea In Battle To Death With Asiatic Beetle
\vskip 10pt
{\flushleft [{\ldots}]}

\begin{center}
Washington Keeps Eye On Radicals

\vskip 10pt
{\itshape Arise rejected of the earth}
\vskip 10pt
\textsc{paris brussels moscow geneva add their voices}

\begin{verse}
\begin{center}
{\itshape It is the final conflict}\vinphantom{ his}\\
\vinphantom{It }{\itshape Let each stand in his place}
\end{center}
\end{verse}

Geologist Lost In Cave Six Days

\vskip 10pt

{\itshape The International Party}

\vskip 10pt

SACCO AND VANZETTI MUST DIE

\vskip 10pt

{\itshape Shall be the human race.}
\end{center}

{\flushleft [{\ldots}]}

\begin{center}
\Large {\itshape The Camera Eye (50)}
\end{center}
\OnehalfSpacing
\hspace{2 em}they\hspace{1 em}have\hspace{1 em}clubbed\hspace{1 em}us\hspace{1 em}off\hspace{1 em}the\hspace{1 em}streets\hspace{2 em}they\hspace{1 em}are\hspace{1 em}stronger\hspace{1 em}they are rich\hspace{1 em}they hire and fire the politicians the newspaper editors {\ldots} they hire the men with guns\hspace{2 em}the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons

all right you have won\hspace{1 em}you will kill the brave men our friends tonight

there is nothing left to do\hspace{1 em}we are beaten\hspace{1 em}we the beaten crowd together\cite[1155–1156]{usa}
\end{quotation}

You can see the results here. And a shortened version of the .tex file, which generates the pdf, is available here.

Zotero 2.0 and my library

Humanities Computing at the UofC recently had a lunchtime talk about various online bibliographic tools for academics. Hopefully it’ll eventually be online (hint, hint), but we spent most of our time discussing CiteULike (which IDidn’tLike) and the new public beta of Zotero 2.0. I’ve mentioned Zotero a bit in the past, but I want to make sure that I can explain that version 2 offers a lot of great new benefits, especially for someone like me who uses Zotero as narrowly as possible.

First, and this should be enough to upgrade, Zotero stores all of your information in the cloud. There was some uncertainty about whether it would also store your pdfs up there (that would be slow and cumbersome), but your various listings and folders do go up there. This means I no longer have to sync Zotero between my computer on campus and the machine at home. Furthermore, I get a cute little social media profile where you can actually see my bibliographies. It’s been my impression that people in the humanities tend to secretly hoard their bibliographies a bit (my department’s orals lists, for example, are kept secret), almost like how djs tear labels off records to obscure their source material. This is in direct opposition to the sciences. Many people post their .bib files to papers and the like straight to the web. If someone wants to steal my 300-tome (or so) booklist and write “the same” dissertation as I, they are more than welcome to try. In the meantime, I want to give the world some more flipping information.

The social media profile on Zotero also allows one to follow other Zotero users, and, presumably, learn things about their bibliographies. This could be pretty cool in the future. But I haven’t really used it much. This is mostly since I use Zotero for a very specific purpose in my workflow, which I’ll now describe.

This description is for Tim from Virginia Tech, who wrote in to ask about how I tie Zotero together with DevonThink, a program that is far more interesting to me than even the cute-cool social medianess of Zotero 2.0. Zotero I use pretty much for one thing: aggregating a list of titles that can then be exported to a BibTeX file. Oh, and shared with the world, which is in contrast to my DT databases, which are riddled with private information. As one can see, I even have a “not yet sent to bibdesk” folder in Zotero, precisely so I can track that kind of stuff. Zotero is great for pulling stuff quickly off JSTOR or a library catalog, but I absolutely do not use any of its other features, like the little annotation spaces, or the uploading of the pdfs. I don’t want to work in a browser, after all. Scrape the info off the webpage, export to BibDesk, and be done.

The meat comes on the DevonThink side for me. That’s where every book gets a folder filled with notes, citations, pdfs (if I’ve scanned in pages) and the like—including, perversely (considering I use Zotero), the catalog entry for the book on our library’s web directory. It’s a process I do by hand, but that’s ok, since I only create a folder for an object (book, article) once I have something to say about it (or a pdf to drop into it). If all I’ve got is a bilbiographic entry, then I don’t bother putting it in DT. Let it stay in my dissertation.bib file and on Zotero.

I’ve even split up my databases in DT because the “Moacir.dtBase2″ was getting too big (and, well, I didn’t need to have recipes come up in searches on criticism). But I do toss nearly everything into “Dissertation.dtBase2.” When @pareidoliac tweets a link to Delanda or Deleuze, I scrape it into an item in the Dissertation.dtBase2 inbox (and read it whenever). In fact, I’m strongly considering upgrading to DevonThink Pro Office, so that I can subsequently put my entire mess up online. This may be useful, and it may be sort of the WMD version of Zotero.

I’m not sure if this is the best way of doing things, but it’s how I’m doing it for now. Using Zotero much more extensively, I think, would trip up the flow, perhaps by creating redundancies. I tried, for example, to note in Zotero what texts got cited by other texts, but then I abandoned the idea as useless–and then also decided that that sort of meshwork is better suited for DT, anyway.

It’s not likely that my reliance on centralization will lead me to even write in DT (though that’s obviously possible!), if only since Scrivener is so pleasant, but, yes, Tim, I use Zotero for as little as possible.

My answer, however, is limited not just to Lithuanian, but to nearly any Latin-based writing system. The US Extended keyboard supports 19 dead keys for various diacritics that make it useful for writing in nearly every non-Cyrillic/non-Greek/non-Arabic language of Europe: Czech, Polish, Latvian, etc.

So although my video below is predominately interested in Lithuanian typing, I hope it’s clear that it can be used for much more. And forgive its clunkiness–it’s my first ever screencast.

Enabling Lithuanian (or other Euro) typing on the Mac
from Moacir P. de Sá Pereira on Vimeo.

It’s not too tricky, but it’s trickier than part A was… I’m indebted, by the way, to Stuart’s post on setting the headers.

Anyway, basically, we want to do three things:

1. Get the author’s surname somehow
2. If we don’t have a surname, make a blank
3. Have some xslt transfer the information to LaTeX

Easy!

Tell Scrivener the author’s last name

The first step is Scrivener specific. MultiMarkdown documents (which are what we’re using to transfer from Scrivener to LaTeX) have Metadata. If you’ve followed the tutorial on the MultiMarkdown site, you’re a pro at this. Let’s assume you haven’t.

In Scrivener, go to File > MultiMarkdown Settings… The “Meta-Data” window drops down. On the left are Keys, and on the right is the value corresponding to the selected key. This is, of course, where you define your Title, Subtitle, Author, LaTeX XSLT, and BibTeX keys, among others. So we’ll create another, called simply, “Surname”.

Click on the “+” on the left, type in Surname, and in the large white area on the right, type in your surname (or that of the author of the document you are writing).

Editing the .xslt

Now get ready… This part is tricky.

1. Making the .xslt find the surname metadata

   First, we have to open up the xhtml2latex.xslt that we edited in my first tutorial on customizing MultiMarkdown. To whit: in the Finder, type Apple-shift-G and type in:

   ~/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown/XSLT

   Open up the file called “xhtml2latex.xslt” in TextEdit or TextWrangler. If you just double click on it, it will open in Safari. Not useful. To open it with a different program “right” or option-click on the file and choose “Open With” in the dropdown menu. Then pick a real text editor.

   Now we need to install some code in the file. Around line 67, you should see:

   <xsl:template match="html:meta">
     <xsl:choose>


   Right after that <xsl:choose>, paste in:

   <!-- surname metadata added for page headers -->
<xsl:when test="translate(@name,'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ', 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz') = 'surname'">
<xsl:text>\def\surnamecomma{</xsl:text>
<xsl:call-template name="clean-text">
<xsl:with-param name="source">
<xsl:value-of select="@content"/>
</xsl:with-param>
</xsl:call-template>
<xsl:text>, }
</xsl:text>
</xsl:when>
<!-- end surname metadata -->

   It’s important to nail this, so that’s why I encourage copying and pasting. Note especially the line with the , }. that means that it’s going to append a comma and a space to the surname you provide in the Scrivener metadata, automatically.

   Right after the bit you pasted in, a new <xsl:when test should begin that hunts for the name.

2. Defining a blank surname

   This step is initially easy, but that’s misleading. Now, the xhtml2latex.xslt is good at assuming metadata isn’t defined. So let’s assume that the “surname” key isn’t defined, and just make it blank. Hop to around line 1079, looking for:

   \def\myauthor{Author} % In case these were not included in metadata
\def\mytitle{Title}
\def\mykeywords{}
\def\mybibliostyle{plain}
\def\bibliocommand{}

   Right underneath, add:

   \def\surnamecomma{}

   Under normal circumstances, we’d be set. However, in part A, remember, we told article.xslt to use memoir-xelatex.xslt, and memoir-xelatex.xslt writes over this part of the code that we just altered. So now we have to REPEAT this alteration on the memoir.xelatex.xslt file, opening it in a text editor and so on. Make note of this repeated step![1]

3. Defining the header:

   This is the money part. Back in the xhtml2latex.xslt file, about 100 lines down from where you added the \def\surnamecomma{}, you should see:

   \begin{document}

   Right above it, insert:

   \makepagestyle{surname}
\makeoddhead{surname}{}{}{\surnamecomma\thepage}
\pagestyle{surname}

   Of course, if you added the biblatex functionality from part A, these new three lines would be between the biblatex addition and \begin{document}.

That should be everything you need to do. Now save and export your Scrivener project, and you should get your fancy last name on the page heading if you defined it, and regular page numbers if you didn’t!

1. What a mess this repeated step is, however I’m not sure how to get it to pass the blank variable in all circumstances. Considering that MultiMarkdown repeats information, I don’t think it’s the end of the world to do things this way. It’s just hell of inelegant.

In my last post, I showed how to install the biblatex package along with the MLA style rules for the bibliography and citing in MacTeX. In a later post, I’ll discuss how to roll your own biblatex styles (hint: it’s not that difficult). But for this post, I’m making the first gestures towards the bridge between Scrivener and TeXShop (or, just, .tex).

Scrivener comes built in with support for Fletcher Penney’s MultiMarkdown language. Simply put, MMD lets you type:

Farrell writes, in *Judgment Day*, that “There was really no place to go"[924][#farrell_studs_2004].

And you get, after exporting:

Farrell writes, in {\itshape Judgment Day}, that ``There was really no place to go''\cite[924]{farrell_studs_2004}.

Similarly, MultiMarkdown changes the “footnote” field in Scrivener (the colored bubble over the text) into \footnote{} regions. There are a few other things MultiMarkdown does, of course, but I’ve included above the basics for writing in the humanities: how to italicize, how to make a (BibTeX/biblatex) citation, and that unicode characters (the fancy quotes are generated in Scrivener) get converted to their LaTeX counterparts. Making blockquotes (start a line with “> “) is displayed in the example at the end.

Now there are two steps not included, that are, all the same, pretty darned important: setting the metadata and choosing the right .xslt. The XSLT is the XHTML/XML translator that converts the xml generated by what you wrote in Scrivener into LaTeX. It works decently, but the default settings are not what I want. The metadata business I’m saving for a separate post.

There were basically four things (for now) that I needed to do to the default MultiMarkdown .xslts to get the result to match what I wanted, so that there would be very, very little editing of the .tex file at the end of the process.

This meant that I would have to edit the .xslt files. The best way to do this is to install your own copy of MultiMarkdown from Fletcher. This installs MMD in ~/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown. There, in the XSLT folder, you will find all the .xslts we will be messing with. Anyway, here were the four things I wanted to do, and a present at the end:

1. Get MMD to use XeLaTeX
2. Get MMD to use biblatex / MLA
3. Get MMD to let me type LaTeX straight into the Scrivener window
4. Get MMD to double space for me
5. GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE FILE!

Getting MMD to use XeLaTeX

I would normally use the “article” document class in LaTeX to write something like a dissertation proposal. MMD, however, prefers to keep everything within the memoir class, which has a flag that mimics the article class. In the Scrivener project MultiMarkdown Settings metadata, I tell Scrivener to use article.xslt as the value for the “LaTeX XSLT.” So the first file we have to change is ~/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown/XSLT/article.xslt.

The change I need to make here is simple: we can see that it imports the memoir.xslt file. Fletcher has written a memoir-xelatex.xslt. So change line 39 (in the version I’m using) from:

<xsl:import href="memoir.xslt"/>

to:

<xsl:import href="memoir-xelatex.xslt"/>

There is not much difference between the two memoir*.xslts. In fact, the xelatex one calls memoir.xslt. But it does declare the fontspec package, and it disables the inputenc package.

While you have article.xslt open, though, you might as well change line 52 as well, to get your text to be 12pt. Change:

<xsl:text>\documentclass[oneside,article]{memoir}</xsl>

to:

<xsl:text>\documentclass[12pt,oneside,article]{memoir}</xsl>

Congrats. This was the easy step. If you export a document from Scrivener now, it’ll include the fontspec package, so you can change the .tex file and specify which font you like.

Getting MMD to use biblatex

This is a bit trickier, and it assumes that you’ve installed both biblatex and the MLA definitions. If you haven’t, read my tutorial on doing that. First, let’s open the file we declared in the previous step, memoir-xelatex.xslt. Here we can see the “latex-header” template. On line 55, you can even see where Palatino is the default font for XeLaTeX. If you like, change that to something more dramatic, like Hoefler Text. Now it’s possible to include the biblatex changes here, but then if you ever write a file that does not use the memoir-xelatex.xslt, you will have to add the biblatex support in that xslt. Better hold off.

So instead, then, let’s move up the inheritance tree to the regular memoir.xslt, which gets called by memoir-xelatex.xslt. Here we see the template for “latex-footer”, which includes where the bibliography command is printed. In biblatex, you print the bibliography using the \printbibliography command, so, starting on line 55, we can change:

% Bibliography
\bibliographystyle{\mybibliostyle}
\bibliocommand

to:

% Bibliography
%\bibliographystyle{\mybibliostyle}
%\bibliocommand
\printbibliography % this is how biblatex wants me to make the bib.

We could now declare the biblatex package elsewhere in memoir.xslt, but it’s better to move up the tree one more step, into xhtml2latex.xslt. Still, if you’ve got memoir.xslt open, hop on over to line 108 and change the margins from 1.5in to the more reasonable 1.0in.

Now that you’ve got xhtml2latex.xslt open, we can see that lots and lots of the magic gets done here. But we want to jump down to where the “latex-intro” template begins, which is at line 1077. The first step here is to commend out pagebackref. In general, I’m not a big fan of the hyperref package, as I think having hyperlinks in pdfs is often unsightly. But no matter what you think of hyperref, biblatex complains about pagebackref all the same. So change line 1090 from:

pagebackref,

to:

% pagebackref, % biblatex complains about this.

The next step is to call the biblatex package with the MLA style, as well as run the bibliography command. In the default memoir.xslt, \bibliocommand is run in the footer. Biblatex wants it run before the \begin{document}. So move to where \begin{document} happens (line 1135), and just before it, change:

\title{\mytitle}
\author{\myauthor}
 
\begin{document}

to:

\title{\mytitle}
\author{\myauthor}
 
\usepackage[style=mla]{biblatex} % Adds MLA biblatex.
\bibliocommand % biblatex needs this command before the document begins
 
\begin{document}

Note that \bibliocommand is a nonce command defined by MMD during the process of translation. If you were writing a LaTeX document from scratch, you would type \bibliography{/your/path/to/the/bibtexfile.bib} instead.

Save, and now when you export (assuming that you set your BibTeX metadata in Scrivener appropriately), you should be able to roll the MLA biblatex bibliography.

Get MMD to let me type LaTeX straight into the Scrivener window

This is not yet fully perfected, as some escaping still gets done. But it’s not a lot. To type LaTeX into Scrivener, the only change you need to do here is made in xhtml2latex.xslt, which we just used. Change line 40 from:

<xsl:import href="clean-text.xslt"/>

to:

<xsl:import href="clean-text-allow-latex.xslt"/>

Now you can type LaTeX code straight into the Scrivener window. Apparently, LaTeX code typed within HTML comments (<!– and –>) goes through cleanly, regardless. If you’re typing something longer, an equation, say, I would encourage typing it within the HTML comments.

There are two glitches I’ve found:

1. If I type, say, \cite[924]{farrell_studs_2004} in Scrivener, MMD changes that to \cite[924]{farrell\_studs\_2004}, which makes BibTeX freak out. The [page][#key] MMD syntax is an ok alternative, but it limits some of the power of biblatex. Of course, doing a global find replace in on \_ is not the end of the world.
2. If I type Here is a sentence.\cite[page]{key}, Scrivener changes the \cite to a \Cite. This is, of course, a different command. And it is one that biblatex doesn’t understand. So it freaks. I could either disable auto-caps on Scrivener, or just pay attention to this quirk. It seems that Scrivener should know to avoid auto-capping after a backslash!

All in all, though, a nice feature.

Get MMD to double space for me

Interestingly enough, this step took me the longest to figure out, since no matter what I did, XeLaTeX would flip out when I’d run the command \doublespacing. It turns out that the memoir class doesn’t like the setspace package. I have no idea why. In any case, go back to xhtml2latex.xslt, and scoot down to line 1136, which should be where we declare \bibliocommand for biblatex. Here, change:

\bibliocommand % biblatex needs this command before the document begins
 
\begin{document}

\bibliocommand % biblatex needs this command before the document begins
 
\DisemulatePackage{setspace}
\usepackage{setspace}
\singlespacing
 
\begin{document}

Now this defaults to singlespacing. However, since you can flippin’ type LaTeX straight into Scrivener, wherever you want to start double spacing, just type \doublespacing on a line by itself, and everything from then on will be double-spaced until you toss out a different spacing command.

UPDATE: As signinstranger pointed out, the memoir class does have doublespacing built in, so there is no need to use setspace. To start typing doublespaced, run the command \DoubleSpacing on a line by itself in Scrivener. When you’re ready to jump to singlespacing, type \SingleSpacing. More information can be found on page 11. of this pdf.

GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE FILE!

OK. Here’s what I typed into Scrivener:

This is some English text. It is a whole paragraph so we can see the spacing of the document. In order to take up a paragraph, I will repeat this sentence. In order to take up a paragraph, I will repeat this sentence. In order to take up a paragraph, I will repeat this sentence. In order to take up a paragraph, I will repeat this sentence.

\doublespacing

Here is a second paragraph. However, I would like to type in Russian. Luckily, my font is set to Hoefler Text, which has support for Cyrillic. И я могу сейчас писать по-русскии хорошо. Now I’m back to English. But wait, my friend sent me a letter in Chinese, where he tells me about his likes and dislikes. Hoefler can’t handle Chinese, so I need to change the font to let you know what he writes:

\setromanfont{LiHei Pro}

> 我很喜欢吃小孩子。

\setromanfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Hoefler Text}

I’m not letting this friend near my younger siblings!

I think this is enough to show how neat Scrivener can be! I’m in love! Sadly, I didn’t feel like putting in the extra effort of getting Hebrew to print correctly. That’s the next step!

And here is the pdf I got: download.

My trouble with the Yiddish text I was using was that I could not get, in three tries, a font to render the alef with the patah correctly except for Times New Roman, which wrote the letters rtl, but the words ltr. So I punted. I found, however, this page which describes how to get Hebrew (and any other rtl) language up and running in XeTeX. And, since you can type LaTeX straight into Scrivener, you can type merrily away in your rtl language of choice surrounded by whatever environment you choose. But adding the various extra settings in the preamble are beyond the scope of this little tutorial.

BibTeX has lots of packages for publishing sciencey or similar bibliographies. The humanities support is, in comparison, awful. But there is some, and it works decently. MLA bibliographies used to be a subset of the jurabib BibTeX package, but jurabib has been frozen. Its mantle is now taken up by BibLaTeX, which has an MLA style.

Unfortunately, BibLaTeX is not installed as part of the MacTeX distribution (as of my writing this). So you’ve got to install it by hand. It’s a three step process, as you actually have to install three separate packages: etoolbox, BibLaTeX, and the MLA definitions.

1. Installing etoolbox:
   1. Download etoolbox.
   2. The expanded .zip will have a file, “etoolbox.sty.” That’s all you care about here.
   3. Type Apple-Shift-G in the Finder and under “Go to the Folder:” type in “~/Library/texmf/”
   4. You are now in the folder where all your personal additions to MacTeX are placed. Inside the tex folder, there should be a “latex” folder. Make a new folder in there called “etoolbox”
   5. Copy etoolbox.sty into that etoolbox folder.
2. Installing BibLaTeX:
   1. Download BibLaTeX.
   2. Expand the .zip. The “bibtex” and “latex” folders are what’s important here.
   3. This is where things get tricky. Go the ~/Library/texmf folder like when you installed etoolbox. Create a folder called “bibtex” at the top level if there isn’t one already. Inside of it, create a folder called “bst”
   4. Inside the bst folder you just created, put the “biblatex.bst” file (inside of the bibtex folder inside of the biblatex folder from the expanded .zip from step 2.2).
   5. Now inside the tex/latex/ folder, where you put the etoolbox folder, create a separate folder called “biblatex” Into this folder copy the contents of the “latex” folder from step 2.2 (biblatex.sty, biblatex.def, bibnatex.def, biblatex.cfg, and the lbx, cbx, and bbx folders). It should look like this graphic, where yellow folders are folders you have to create, and green are objects copied over from the etoolbox.zip and the biblatex.zip.
3. Installing MLA BibLaTeX definitions:
   1. Download BibLaTeX-MLA.
   2. Expand the .zip
   3. Move the “mla.cbx” file from the biblatex-mla folder you just unzipped into the “cbx” folder in ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/biblatex/.
   4. Move the “mla.bbx” file from the biblatex-mla folder you just unzipped into the “bbx” folder in ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex/biblatex/.

That should be it. The MLA files should be installed. Making the bibliography appear in your .tex document will be a different post.

But I am also humbly imagining a service that I am providing for people who realize that there must be a more comfortable and fulfilling way of producing academic work than within Microsoft Office. There is. But before I can go into greater detail, I have to explain that I, personally, imagine the academic process as made up of four steps:

1. research
2. collecting research
3. drafting / writing
4. submitting

Word, especially with collaboration with EndNote, tries to be the main player in all four steps. I think that kind of thinking is misguided. More importantly, it limits creativity, as the user gets frustrated with being only able to work within what Word expects.

We humanities students need to remember that there is no one tool that does everything for us, not even our brains. We should not be using Microsoft Word (or Pages) for everything we do.

My “day job” is working with computers for the Economics and Sociology departments, and I just installed a computer for an Economics professor that uses Mathematica, MATLAB, and Stata. And his installation is not unique–in the social sciences, they realize that different tools do different things well. To me, all three of those programs “do stuff with numbers,” yet to the professor, they clearly excel at separate tasks.

In the humanities, we need to internalize that “doing stuff with text” means different things depending on what we’re doing. So just like the Econ prof distributes his doing things with numbers among several programs (and we can include LyX and TeXShop to his specific process), we need to distribute our own doing things with text among several programs.

But before I return to the four steps in academic production above, I should include my sort of outlined boundaries of this project:

1. I’m writing documentation only for Macs. I don’t hate PCs; I use one nearly every day, and one of the main reasons I want a new, fast Mac is so that I can run PC software on it via Parallels. But I’m writing my dissertation on a Mac. Steps 2 and 4 of the dissertation/research process (collecting research and submitting) are cross-platform (and free). But my steps 1 and 3 will be Mac-specific (and cost money).
2. I’m trying to keep costs down. Microsoft Office is free for me, because of a University agreement, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to hand-build competition that costs money. But there are some benefits to spending money, and that goes into 3.
3. I want to be able to find help easily. All four steps of the research project are backed by software with a very active user community doing stuff that is very similar to what I want to do. Word forums are full of people trying to get mail merges to work, or solving Blue Screens of Death, or doing any of the 2300839403 things that Word can also do. And this is, of course, true only for when answers to Word problems aren’t hidden behind for-pay firewalls.

   Some of the software I’m using is maintained by a handful of people (or in the case of Scrivener and MultiMarkDown, just one person apiece), and I have their email addresses. My concerns go straight to them, not into a massive pool of complaint that must exist outside of Redmond.

4. I want to be able to bail and configure easily. If a system stops being updated, I don’t want to be left out in the lurch. So I want to be working with, almost exclusively, open formats that, with known limitations, have been around for a long time. Similarly, I want to be able to configure things easily should something newer and better come about. This means I want to be able to define styles and configurations within text files, not within a bunch of buttons I have to click nested deep in submenus.

So now I can provide a basic computing framework for how I expect my personal academic process to look:

1. Research. This will be done by reading and commenting by me, with the data ending up in a Personal Information Manager. I’m using, for that, DEVONthink Pro, which cost me under $40 with the instant educational discount. Obviously, other PIMs exist, such as Yojimbo, a Moleskine notebook (my original plan), or just regular note-cards. But I will be writing about DEVONthink when it comes time to solve problems with step 1 (so far I haven’t found any).
2. Collecting Research. This is marshalling the information I already have. For this, I’m using Zotero, an extension for Firefox, as a bibliographic manager. This second step is sort of non-linear, as what data is in Zotero gets updated at the same time as new data enters into DEVONthink, but it is a separate process, so it gets its own step. Here one can use, again, note-cards, Sente, EndNote, or even RefWorks. Zotero, however, for me is light, fast, and it doesn’t make a lot of mistakes. It’s also free and exciting, and it will soon be portable—having access to my bibliography anywhere in the world is very tantalizing.
3. Drafting/Writing. I’m not sure if this is the most important part of the process. It’s certainly not the least important. For now, I’m using Scrivener, which cost me under $40 with the educational discount.

   Most of my writing lately is in TextEdit, but that is for short things, like this post. Something that is juggling several balls at once, like a dissertation proposal, works much better in Scrivener, which can let me see the intellectual structure of the document (the “outline”) right beside the document itself. Scrivener can also provide me with a wide open space where I can write without distraction (full-screen mode). In the proposal, where shifts occur on a paragraph basis, that is not as useful as I imagine it will be when I am actually writing the chapters.

   I’m using Scrivener along with MultiMarkdown to generate usable, cleanish .tex files for step 4. MultiMarkdown is built into Scrivener, but since I know I will be making customizations to it, it is worth installing separately.

4. Submitting. I want to submit only pdfs. I want to not have to worry about citations looking right. I want what I submit to work, period. I don’t want to worry about renumbering footnotes, or losing cross references. And I want it to look sharp. Here, I’m going to be using the MacTeX distribution of TeX, and I’m going to be using, more specifically, the XeLaTeX/XeTeX macros to generate my pdfs.

So now I can start my documenting process!