Regular readers know that I’m fascinated by the ways that non-technical folks make use of Emacs. Despite our prejudiced assumptions, they are often sophisticated and subtle in the ways they leverage Emacs. Recently, Eric Fraga tweeted a pointer to a long article by Kieran Healy on using plain text and Emacs for writing in the social sciences.
The article is mainly addressed to the beginning graduate school student and makes the case that if you are going to do any quantitative work in your research then you’re better off using plain text and a text editor rather than a word processor for writing your papers and books. Most Irreal readers won’t find this the slightest bit controversial and will need no convincing but social scientists are different. Their culture and training has led them to believe that writing papers is something done with Word. Their professional journals agree. With that in mind, it’s easy to see why Haley’s position can be a hard sell.
Healy is mostly concerned with workflow and although he is an Emacs user, he doesn’t insist that it’s the only good solution. He suggests several alternatives but does note that Emacs is a powerful tool that can make writing easier. He assumes that “quantitative” means “statistical” and that his readers will be using R. His workflow involves writing in Markdown and using knitr to evaluate the R code blocks and insert the results in much the same way that Org and Babel work. Org and Babel would provide a more seamless and slightly easier solution so I’m not sure why he doesn’t use them. Healy is a Full Professor at Duke so Org probably wasn’t available when he started and he’s just stuck with his “good enough” solution. The article discusses his entire tool chain with particular attention to revision control and backups so it’s about more than just what editor and markup language to use.
As I said, the article is long—a PDF version runs to 49 pages (although with generous margins)—but it’s interesting and makes many good points even if you don’t agree with all his choices of tools. I recommend reading the PDF version because it has the footnotes and is a single document rather than a series of pages.