HYPERUNIVERSITY

Taking the Future to the University

Academia depends on the circulation and exchange of ideas, but the tools we currently use have not been made with the needs of researchers in mind. The lack of collaborative tools, tedious publishing processes and friction are just a few of the problems this entails. Tools to improve our scholarly workflows already exist, but remain opaque for many of us, as academic craftsmanship is no priority in most university curricula.

HYPERUNIVERSITY aims to bridge the incomplete digital turn in academia from solid analog techniques to digital ones, fit for the 21st century. HYPERUNIVERSITY provides curated resources for contemporary digital tools and training in computer skills to students and scholars in the humanities. HYPERUNIVERSITY delivers sustainable tool chains for scholarly work, from idea to publication, for authors and publishers. HYPERUNIVERSITY teaches note taking, text editing, reference management, layouting, and collaborative version control. HYPERUNIVERSITY contributes to public debates about research, editing, and digitized publishing practices.

The working group HYPERUNIVERSITY consists of researchers from the humanities, social, and computer sciences. We learned how to use the free resources that others have generously shared on the web in order to reap the benefits of contemporary tooling. We want to give back what we have learned and encourage you to join us in this lifelong endeavour for a better and open world.

Resources

Here is an initial list of resources that we have compiled from the web. Feel free to stroll around those pages and see what might be useful for you!

Awesome Digital History (list)

Finding aids for textual and multimedia primary sources with a focus on the western hemisphere and the 19th and 20th centuries. Courses and learning tools to explore history digitally.
— by Moritz Mähr

Awesome Scientific Writing (list)

Scientific writing can extend beyond LaTeX, made possible by formats, such as Markdown (and its many flavours), reStructuredText and Jupyter notebooks.
— by Ashwin Vishnu

Setting Up a Scholarly Writing Environment With Markdown, VSCodium and pandoc (video)

Introduction to Markdown, YAML frontmatter, VSCodium vs. MS Visual Studio Code, Extensions for VSCodium: Markdown Preview Enhanced, Pandoc Citer and Live Server; pandoc, pandoc-citeproc and pandoc-crossref for footnotes, citations and (cross) references; export of BibLaTeX from Zotero, Citation Style Language (CSL); entr for watching changes while writing
— by Axel Dürkop

Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown (guide)

In this tutorial, you will first learn the basics of Markdown—an easy to read and write markup syntax for plain text—as well as Pandoc, a command line tool that converts plain text into a number of beautifully formatted file types: PDF, .docx, HTML, LaTeX, slide decks, and more.
— by Dennis Tenen and Grant Wythoff

Getting Started with Zotero 4 (playlist)

This video tutorial will take you through the steps of installing and using the citation management program Zotero (version 4). If you're writing a paper with more than a few sources or putting together a thesis, investing the time into learning how to use Zotero will save you hours of headaches and heartaches down the road.
— by Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody

Markdown: Academic Writing in Plain Text (playlist)

In this video tutorial, I show you the advantages of academic writing in Markdown.
— by Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody

Create Zettel from Reading Notes According to the Principle of Atomicity

A tutorial on writing Zettelkasten notes from zettelkasten.de
— by Christian Tietze

Git for Academics (video)

A lot of people have asked me in recent weeks how git works. Git is a version control system (VCS) that was originally designed only with software developers in mind. However, git contains unique features that researchers in the arts and humanities can also make use of.
— by Hendrik Erz

My Workflow (blog post)

Following some discussions over on the Zettlr forum I’m attempting to write up my workflow in some kind of coherent fashion. In the spirit of “working with the garage door open” I’m using a task that I’m working on right now. In stepping through the process, then my workflow will become clearer (to me, as well as you). As the genesis of this was to expand on how I use Zettlr, I hope that this will also be adequately addressed and prove helpful for others.
— by Justin Clark

Digitales Propädeutikum (Digital Propaedeutics, German)

A "living document" containing a lot of useful links for digital workflows, divided into four modules. German only.
— by Gertraud Koch, Roman Knipping-Sorokin, Natalie Isaak, and others (University of Hamburg)

The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science

Kieran Healy (Duke University) has written a long introduction on how one can use plain text tools as a social scientist. He himself focuses on Markdown and R with emacs, utilizing some older mechanisms such as makefiles to automate his workflow.
— by Kieran Healy