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Forward to the Dark Ages of Document Processing!

I recently finished and submitted an article for a journal. Apart from submissions in “*.doc / *.docx, *.rtf or *.odt,” as it says on the journal’s Web site, the agreement I signed actually also permits submissions in “XML according to TEI as per [the journal’s] schema.” As the article is ultimately published in TEI—the HTML is generated from TEI, and you can even download the TEI—this would only seem logical, but see my earlier rant on publishing in digital humanities (I still have to say a few more words on this topic, but this’ll have to wait for some other time). I certainly don’t subject myself to writing an article in Word, so it was clear that I would submit it in TEI.

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Digital Humanities Publishing

I have a long-standing interest in electronic digital publishing. In fact, my first job after getting my master’s degree was with a large scientific publisher, so besides having the experience of an author and editor, I also know a thing or two about the role of scientific publishers. It is from this time that I still have a rubber stamp saying “SGML,” which I keep because it says a lot about scholarly publishing.

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Yet Another Publication List?

Cerstin Mahlow recently had a very good blog post on storing your publication list online with services such as ResearchGate, Mendeley, or Academia.edu. Cerstin expressed a preference for CiteULike, and I agree with her on that, and I also agree with the rest of her post. I’d like to add a few thoughts of my own.

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Timeo Danaos… Or: Why I’m Wary of Google Docs

During the last couple of weeks I had to use Google Docs quite heavily in order to work on a large, collaborative document. Without any doubt, Google Docs is a convenient platform for collaborative work, offering collaborative real-time, browser-based, WYSIWYG editing for various types of documents. However, the experience was not a good one, as the 150-page document clearly tested the limits of Google Docs. Loading the document was slow; navigating even more so. I wasted a lot of time trying to export the document as PDF file; sometimes it worked, but most of the time, I could only download an empty file, regardless of whether I used Safari or Google’s own Chrome browser. For editing, however, Chrome eventually turned out to be required, and I was forced to use it, even though I have serious issues with Chrome.

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