Ista Zahn of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences is a long time Emacs user. A year or so ago, a user asked for an Emacs configuration with a specific set of features and Zahn realized that his configuration already had most of what the user wanted. They got together and produced a configuration aimed at Social Science users.
As you might expect, the configuration is heavily slanted towards LaTeX, git, R, Stata, SAS, and Julia. If you follow the link to his dotemacs GitHub, you’ll see that the README (available as markdown and Org) is a nice discussion of what the configuration is trying to do as well as the actual implementation.
If you’re in the Social Sciences and tired of Word and other soul and energy sucking software, be sure to give Zahn’a configuration a try. As many others before you have found, Emacs will make you more productive and probably lower your blood pressure as well1. Even if you’re not a social scientist, you may find something useful in the configuration—many of us write in LaTeX and use R, after all.
Footnotes:
Well, at least after you get past the initial learning curve.