Today I wanted to address a common issue I see in troubleshooting LaTeX errors, on StackOverflow and in personal questions. It usually stems from newbies who aren’t yet aware of all the functionality provided by standard packages and thus, try to reinvent the wheel when something doesn’t work the way they expect. Why reinventing the wheel is a problem In my experience, even from me helping people with packages that I’m not all that familiar with myself, it’s always best not to reinvent the wheel (even if you succeed, the result is likely sub-par unless you’re actually really good at what you’re doing). Ask yourself if the functionality you want is something that’s likely to be a common problem. Then maybe somebody has already solved it in a comprehensive way! That’s what packages are for and that’s why they’re (hopefully) maintained by people who have given the problem at hand a good bit of thought. It is very likely that
Tech/IT 101
A category which might be useful to some ‘Normal Humanists’ on their way to becoming Digital Humanists, but containing tips which are not typically DH, like image manipulation, practical tips on “How do I make an academic poster (without having to learn LaTeX)” etc. These usually stem from friends asking me to explain something and I don’t want to have to explain it 20 times, so I put it into a post, so other people can profit from it too. Having to explain Tech 101 which is not actually related to my DH work is also a fundamental part of your work as a DH person. Sometimes it’s annoying to “be that guy” who has to explain tech stuff I am not getting paid to explain to you guys, but I try to embrace it and that’s why I make use of these occasions to share those (still very valuable) tips with all of you.
However, I’m not sure whether “Tech 101” is the best title for it. Kind of suggests some more ‘techie’ kind of stuff ;) Please let me know if you have any better ideas.
Long-Term Twitter Strategizing: The Ninja’s “How to better promote your content on Twitter” Guide. Part 4
Twitter is an important professional networking platform for the Digital Humanities. But it’s not exactly self-evident how to make it work in your favour. This part explains long-term Twitter Strategy. This involves a few elements which might not seem so important at first but will be to keep your Twitter presence active and at a steady growth rate, without having to constantly put in lots of effort. This includes scheduled Tweets and using analytics and reflection to determine how to best cater to the interests of your followers. As some of you might remember, I did a Twitter Engagement Experiment at some time in autumn last year. Now I wanted to share my most important learnings, so you can make your Twitter presence more effective with just as little work as you want to put in. Actually, this was all just meant to be one post but it got so crazy long that I decided to make it into a
Bio Engineering, Tweet Structure or How to lure your audience: The Ninja’s “How to better promote your content on Twitter” Guide. Part 3
Twitter is an important professional networking platform for the Digital Humanities. But it’s not exactly self-evident how to make it work in your favour. This part explains how you can improve the rate you’re gaining followers at by immediately providing them with reliable information about what value you provide for them. The best and quickest way to achieve that is by a one-time improvement session for your bio! If that’s not a life hack 😉 As some of you might remember, I did a Twitter Engagement Experiment at some time in autumn last year. Now I wanted to share my most important learnings, so you can make your Twitter presence more effective with just as little work as you want to put in. Actually, this was all just meant to be one post but it got so crazy long that I decided to make it into a series of digestible short posts. More Twitter Growth/Strategy advice 8) Set up your
Retweet Bots and Hashtags: The Ninja’s “How to better promote your content on Twitter” Guide. Part 2
Twitter is an important professional networking platform for the Digital Humanities. But it’s not exactly self-evident how to make it work in your favour. This part explains all you need to know on retweet bots and hashtags. As some of you might remember, I did a Twitter Engagement Experiment at some time in autumn last year. Now I wanted to share my most important learnings, so you can make your Twitter presence more effective with just as little work as you want to put in. Actually, this was all just meant to be one post but it got so crazy long that I decided to make it into a series of digestible short posts. More Twitter Growth/Strategy advice 4) Use the power of (retweet) bots. During the last year, I have played around with bots or partly-automating retweeting on some Twitter accounts (like the epigrammetry blog’s Twitter) using bots. I created a feminist bot, a #100DaysofDH challenge bot, a #digiclass
Improve your Twitter Strategy: The Ninja’s “How to better promote your content on Twitter” Guide. Part 1
Twitter is an important professional networking platform for the Digital Humanities. But it’s not exactly self-evident how to make it work in your favour. As some of you might remember, I did a Twitter Engagement Experiment at some time in autumn last year. Now I wanted to share my most important learnings, so you can make your Twitter presence more effective with just as little work as you want to put in. I will start with the basics and common advice you can find online in this first post and then add some more info and reflection on my personal experiment in the next one. Actually, this was all just meant to be one post but it got so crazy long that I decided to make it into a series of digestible short posts. This first one will start with the very Twitter basics and why you might want to start your own “Twitter Engagement” experiment. Am I back to
Amateurishly beautifying event photographs
Do people think that you, as a DH person, are also responsible for your project’s outreach activities yet nobody considers
An amateurish but functional tutorial to make (logo) vector graphics from photos
Do you need to make a vector logo for your project but have no idea how? Do you want to
read more An amateurish but functional tutorial to make (logo) vector graphics from photos
Does LaTeX count as “programming”?
Today I wanted to talk about a common question I come across: Does LaTeX count as programming? Many people dismiss this question directly with a no. But I say the answer is not that simple and depending on how you practice LaTeX can definitely be ‘yes’ much more than you might think! Also, something I really don’t appreciate is people meaning to degrade LaTeX when saying using LaTeX has nothing to do with programming (because it does and most people who think that way have just never seen LaTeX being used more like programming). LaTeX is, strictly speaking, a programming language and Turing-complete. Or rather, LaTeX is a macro package for TeX which is the actual Turing complete programming language. The typesetting-specific tools LaTeX provides probably can’t, however, be considered a full programming language on their own anymore. You could theoretically do anything with it, though it might just not be the easiest possible way to accomplish your ends (unless
An inside look into the ‘competition’: Testing Adobe Creative Cloud
It’s not Sunday but since no one really cares anymore what day it is lately with this Corona lockdown situation,
read more An inside look into the ‘competition’: Testing Adobe Creative Cloud
Understanding Scalability and Relative Values
What is the difference between 12pt and “format as heading“? Between 50px or 0.5\textwidth? Most of us know that we should always prefer relative to absolute values. But many who are new to webdesign or LaTeX don’t really get why. All of us who typeset papers and conference proceedings know that years of using MS Word does not necessarily teach you that difference either. This short post will try to remedy this in a quick and painless way 😉 In a WYSIWYG texteditor: Fontsize 12pt or “Format as Heading” In the case of a text editor, it is advisable to use the format templates rather than manually changing headings and so on for simple reasons: The information is stored as markup and if we tell the program what we want formatted as a heading, the machine gets semantic information about the text. Most people will understand that something is meant to be a heading when the font size is manually
Automating XML annotation: Get more done using RegEx Search&Replace and xsl:analyze-string
Annotation is a fundamental part of the DH. But often, us DH people don’t actually do the annotation. We do
read more Automating XML annotation: Get more done using RegEx Search&Replace and xsl:analyze-string
Algorithms, Variables, Debugging? Intro to Programming Concepts
Since I am about to prepare a workshop on natural language processing and a pre-workshop-workshop where I need to quickly/crashcourse introduce my (non-digital) Classicist friends to some basics on programming, let me share a list of programming concepts I compiled with you. I would be happy for your suggestions and comments regarding mistakes. I will probably publish this together with some key concepts of quantitative text analysis (blogpost to come) on a cheatsheet or as slides for you later 😉 Intro to key concepts of programming This list of concepts is not super-structured and meant to work as a ‘reference tool’ as well as a text to be read, so I tried to give it a more or less useful ‘chronology’, meaning that later parts kind of build on earlier ones. I start off with what a computer program or algorithm actually is and how we translate between source code (the code we write) and the code which gets fed
read more Algorithms, Variables, Debugging? Intro to Programming Concepts
Academic Posters – How to design: My favourite tips
This is a post dealing with some simple tips to keep in mind when making academic posters. I have gotten into the habit of not posting very regularly over my fellowship this summer, but I will get back into the rhythm of approximately one post a week 😉 So I decided to give you a quick post with some tips on academic posters here. There will be follow ups on how to make them either using GoogleSlides (if you’re really stressed and can’t learn LaTeX first) and another version where I explain how to create a poster in LaTeX using an Overleaf template for complete beginners. So, without further ado. How to get a nice poster without a lot of skills and little effort: Have a color scheme. Probably best start with your project colours (from the logo, project website) if you have some. This ensures you have some sort of brand identity and your project is recognized more easily.
read more Academic Posters – How to design: My favourite tips
Two basic image manipulation life-savers
In this post, I wanted to share a few tricks for simple image manipulation (with the goal of making pictures
