Re: Newsletter & Call for Papers WebSci'18

Hi,

First, I appreciate Sarven’s dedication to keeping us focused on/aware of the need to adapt our processes to more Web-native approaches, I think it’s admirable, and I agree that it’s highly desirable that we in general end up in a much more Webby world when it comes to scholarly publishing. However…(cont. below)

> On 22 Feb 2018, at 09:12, Peter F. Patel-Schneider <pfpschneider@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 02/21/2018 11:54 PM, Ruben Verborgh wrote:
>>
>> The hard thing of doing research can't be writing the text, right?
>> It's not harder than writing LaTeX.
>
> For me to  switch the new model has to be easier to author content, or make up
> for it in other ways.

I think ease of authoring content has to be the highest priority in encouraging people to switch. New tools such as dokieli are great ideas, and if someone develops their writing processes using tools like that, fantastic. But there’s inertia in people’s habits as well as ideas, and I don’t think there’s ever going to be mass shifts in practice unless it takes as little energy as possible. If there were a drop-in latex2html that actually functionally produced good and nice looking style-compliant HTML (as dokieli does) from LaTeX source, I’d use it immediately. If I could extend that with commands that let me get nice semantically annotated outputs (e.g., \citeas[supporting_evidence]{capadisli2017..}, \citeas[disagree_with]{third2016}, etc., …) in the resulting HTML, I’d be overjoyed - because there’d be minimal changes to my existing workflow.

Yes, my existing workflow is comparatively antiquated (look, I’m only recently starting use text editors other than vi…), but it’s how I do things, and I think I’m probably not alone in not really having the time or energy to learn new ways of going about things so much. By all means, encourage, e.g., PhD students, to start off using dokieli for their paper-writing and to start with Webby workflows early one. I just think in general there are a lot of people who already have habits for how they achieve the technical aspects of producing papers, and shifting those people involves matching their workflows, not asking them to replace them. I suspect a decent LaTeX tool and a decent Word (template? plugin? post-processor? I’m massively familiar with the more technical aspects of Word, so I don’t know how best to do it) tool that generated reasonable Semantic Web friendly and style-matching HTML would significantly increase Webby submissions more effectively than prodding people on CfPs. Not that I’m against that prodding…

Too pessimistic or lazy? Yes, probably. But I think also realistic. :-) Of course, it’s entirely possible that what I want already exists somewhere and I’m missing it, in which case, please let me know!

Allan


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Received on Thursday, 22 February 2018 12:59:50 UTC