mcburton
Joined 16 years ago
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52
Submissions
37
Member since
Mar 6
Recent submissions
Comment · 10 years ago
Comment · 11 years ago
+1 for digital humanities folks. Your emphasis on well written documentation is a strong argument for agate over more powerful, but more confusing, data processing libraries. I'm already thinking about using agate in my digital humanities workshops!
Comment · 13 years ago
The SAXON XSLT processor implements basic XPATH 2.0
Comment · 13 years ago
Video games and programming languages ARE being studied in the humanities [1].
This is, in part, what the Digital Humanities doing, engaging with digital modes of cultural expression [2].
Comment · 13 years ago
It should be noted that the IPython Notebook is being developed to support multiple backends. People are working on backends for Haskell[1], Scala [2], and Julia[3]. I'd love to see a Clojure backend.
All of this does not obviate the challenges of setting up IPython, but that could also be (somewhat)resolved via cloud services[4][5][6].
[1] http://gibiansky.github.io/IHaskell/
[2] https://github.com/mattpap/IScala
[3] https://github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl
[4] http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/python/tutorials/i...
[6] http://blog.picloud.com/2012/12/23/introducing-the-picloud-n...
Comment · 13 years ago
The IPython Notebook is part of the IPython interactive computing environment[1]. You must to install IPython locally(or in the cloud) and run the notebook web server to load and execute the notebook's code live in the browser. These are static HTML representations of the notebooks, think of them as previews, but you can download the JSON .ipynb file and load it up in your IPython Notebook environment and execute the code.
The benefit of the IPython Notebook is sharable JSON file and interactive REPL-like environment that blends code, results, and narrative prose.
[1] http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/stable/interactive/notebook.h...
edit: I should have refreshed the page before I wrote this redundant reply.
Comment · 13 years ago
asciidoc support would require an ansciidoc renderer written in javascript, which does seem to exist[1](although I haven't used it). This also highlights some of the problems with markdown because it is an insufficiently rich language for generating semantically meaningful markup for use-cases beyond blogging. There has been some really interesting work on "scholarly markdown"[2][3], but given the social and technical complexities of markdown implementations and the community[4] seems like adding asciidoc is easier than fixing markdown.
[1] http://asciidoctor.org/news/2013/05/21/asciidoctor-js-render...
[2]https://github.com/scholmd/scholmd/wiki
[3]http://blog.martinfenner.org/2013/06/19/citations-in-scholar...
[4]http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/the-future-of-markd...
Comment · 13 years ago
I haven't started meaningfully playing with nbconvert yet, but I think one of the really promising features are the nbconvert templates[1]. From what I gather you can make custom templates with jinja and invoke them on the command line. It would be interesting to create a docbook, msword, specifically formatted pdf templates which would allow IPython Notebooks to flow into existing print publication workflows (if I recall O'Reilly uses docbook, yes?). I haven't been able to find documentation about the nbconvert templates so I'm dragging this out of memory from an email or a tweet I saw once upon a time.
One thing I'm hoping to figure out is a way to transform IPython Notebooks into PDFs that satisfy my university's dissertation formatting guidelines (one inch margins, 12pt times, etc).
[1] https://github.com/ipython/ipython/tree/master/IPython/nbcon...
Comment · 13 years ago
YES!
I would also love to see a publishing workflow that could render IPython Notebooks for print on dead trees.
Comment · 13 years ago
I see this degree as a huge boon for folks in the technology sector who are already working, but want to pick up a masters degree (for professional development or promotion). This isn't a replacement for the face to face college experience, but individuals who are working full-time don't necessarily want/need that socialization.
This is cheap enough that I could easy see tech companies offering to subsidize this degree as a perk for their employees, assuming the employee gets accepted to the program.
Comment · 14 years ago
"My experience has been that Community Colleges already do a lot of what he's suggesting"
That was my thought exactly. The CC system is quite good at educating people, yet, I feel like many folks pontificating about the "future of education" focus only on "Research 1," or more correctly, doctoral granting universities with very high research activity[1].
[1] "Research 1" is a deprecated, although still widely used, term from the Carnegie Classifications of Higher Education. http://classifications.carnegiefoundation.org/descriptions/b...
Comment · 14 years ago
ugh. I'm still using (and loving) my nexus one but app bloat and the small about of disk space is increasingly making it impossible to use.
Comment · 15 years ago
You should include a link or more description about Elsevier's awful publishing practices for those who aren't already in the know.
Pitt+CMU == complementary research institutions that have had a long tradition of collaborating (for example the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center) and BOTH provide strong intellectual anchors for the city. BOTH are significant.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Pittsburgh#Res...