Introduction

Last updated on 2025-10-08 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • what will the workshop cover?
  • how will the workshop work?
  • why are open practices important for the humanities?

Objectives

  • Understand the goals of the workshop
  • Understand workshop expectations
  • Identify the role of open practices in the humanities
  • Meet Instructors and other participants

Welcome

Before we start the material we will set the stage for the workshop as an environment for learning

Discussion

Icebreaker

Introduce yourself and your main motivation for learning about open research practices.

Introduction

The following concepts– files, version control, and computational thinking –are your gateway to open research and open tools. We will be teaching these concepts via the following Free Open Source Software (FOSS) tools: bash shell, Git, GitHub and MystMd.

Open Research has a lot of benefits: - free software - Universities typically provide centralized support for using this software (the hardware + people) - independence - transparency

However, because it requires more technical knowledge to use most open software, open research is often focused on the sciences and engineering fields. That said, all areas of scholarship can benefit from more openness.

Discussion

When was the last time you paid for software or a digital subscription in your work or faced a barrier in a project because you did not have funds for a piece of software?

Goals and Background

This project was funded by ORCA, led by Sarah, Madison, Jeremiah and supported Ayman and Maya.

Our goals for the curriculum and the workshop are: - platform independence - more collaboration

Outline

By the end of this workshop you will have created an interactive article using Myst.

The workshop is split over four parts, each planned for roughly one half day. In the first part we will set the stage, focusing on some higher level concepts and basic terminology. We will make your very first (or not?) small open source projects. Finally, we will do the installation steps of the software required for the rest of the parts. The downside to open source is that it can be hard to start with because it assumes the user knows more than commercial software does. By the end of the workshop, you will have a better handle on these basics, but to start, we will use some time together to run installs so that you can get help. You will also have a tiny bit of “homework” to find some files and content of your own to use in later sessions, you can probably do this while your installs run.

The next two sessions, we will learn about the bash shell and git. We will learn the shell for two reasons: 1) it is a good way to get hands on practice with most of the key concepts in open source (really, computers broadly) and 2) a lot of open source software is only distributed with a command line interface (CLI; read as an abbreviation) instead of a graphical user interface (GUI, pronounced “gooey”). Git is a version control software that is the current foundation of open source. Most projects are managed with git. GitHub is a popular host for git, owned by Microsoft. There are other hosts though and you could even run your own, git is also open source! We will use GitHub, but the skills you learn in this workshop will be transferable.

On the final day, we will bring these concepts together building your own article with Myst. This will be a way to practice, tying all of the concepts together. We will host your article on GitHub, manage it using git via bash, and build it with mystmd.

Key Points
  • This will be a hands on workshop