Today’s post is something at the interface of rant and rambling. While I love being interdisciplinary, it’s also quite the hassle at times which is why I guess most interdisciplinary scholars sometimes wished they weren’t doing interdisciplinary work. There are so many negative stereotypes, like… “You have it easier being interdisciplinary” vs it’s actually twice the work So do you really think that we have it easier? I hate how we always get this reproach that we’re taking the easy route. Can somebody please explain to me what’s “easy” about having to follow the state of the art in multiple fields at the same time? And then not even knowing where to get published because scholars from discipline A don’t understand half of your research and the same in the other direction. I tend to be somewhat “too historical” for the Digital Humanities but then waaaay to technical for the “normal Humanities”. I think being in the DH and doing
Working as a service provider
Some thoughts on working as a service provider, be it in LaTeX or in the Digital Humanities. By which I don’t mean that working in DH or LaTeX automatically makes you a ‘mere’ service provider, but rather to acknowledge the fact that one of the roles we have in these jobs is being a service provider. There are special skills and problems involved which are discussed in this category.
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
Easy and quick strategies to #scicomm your DH project
Your digital project is great, I’m sure of that – but does it even exist if nobody knows about it? Science communication is the answer to avoid this philosophical dilemma. In this short post, I wanted to share a list of quick-and-easy-to-implement ideas to add some science communication to your projects. This is just a short post to give you some ideas, not tutorials on how to do it. However, I am open to any tutorial requests you might have on the topics involved. As for the Twitter bot, there is a short post available already. So let’s get to it! Quick and easy strategies to #scicomm your DH project Create a better / thematic / facetted search interface. Maybe people aren’t using your data because the interface is not intuitive and they can’t find things or don’t know what to look for and where to look. This is the basic building block to build all the following things on.
read more Easy and quick strategies to #scicomm your DH project
Create your Tweepy/AWS-powered Twitter bot in a day
This post wants to convince you to try out creating a Twitter bot using Python Tweepy and AmazonAWS Lambda because it’s easy and fun. Of course, you can use any other utilities but Tweepy and AWS Lambda are the ones I tried. This is not a full tutorial but I can make one if anyone is interested. Inspired by the #100DaysofDH challenge In this post, I will just give you some basic Twitter knowledge, links for what you need to know to get it done and a link to the github of my #100DaysofDH challenge for which I implemented such a bot. If you want more guidance, please let me know. Also, read the post on the challenge because I noted down some restrictions I realized the Twitter automation guidelines impose on bots as I went along. In my example, I think I’m in fact doing one or two things which you actually shouldn’t do (I think bots shouldn’t like
read more Create your Tweepy/AWS-powered Twitter bot in a day
Planning your project for “service providers”
When writing my last post on how to earn money with LaTeX I realized I actually had a lot of advice on planning and scheduling your project as well. So I will sum up my experiences with all sorts of “customers” (be it project partners or whatever you have). Motivation This is not to complain how horrible things are but just to sum up a few things you should take into account that an unexperienced person might not find self-evident. Seeing as my days of being unexperienced myself are not very far away, the learning process is still pretty fresh and I still remember the problems a beginner can face, so I hope to be able to provide valuable advice. Some of the advice is copied out of the earning money post, so don’t be confused if you feel like you might have already read some of this. Initially I had wanted to extend the old article but since it already
Earning money with LaTeX?
There is this StackOverflow question as to how to monetize your LaTeX skills. So in this post, I want to discuss whether you can earn money using LaTeX and if yes, how so? I also did a little survey on my Twitter, so I can offer you more than just my own biased opinion. Especially as I have done paid work using LaTeX but I don’t regularly do paid work using LaTeX and am happy to have a job where I can use LaTeX often, but am by no means paid specifically to do LaTeX (which is something I highly recommend you aim for too). This post has gotten pretty lengthy, so feel free to read selectively and jump to whatever you’re most interested in. Experiences in the #TeXLaTeX community This is the Twitter post where I asked fellow TeX lovers for their experiences to include in this post: Currently working on a post on “How to earn money
LaTeX Ninja'ing and the Digital Humanities 