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Intro to Markdown
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Introduction to Markdown digital workflows

View workshop slides here

Plain text formats have received increasing attention from scholars in recent years and have been described as among the best ways to store knowledge persistently. This workshop will introduce you to the benefits of using plain text files and simple markup formats to create flexible, robust, and future-proof workflows for digital scholarship, research, and knowlege. We will begin with a brief introduction to the Markdown text format and create a short sample document which with the use of a few simple tools can be converted into a website, dynamic slideshow presentation, PDF, and even a formatted PhD thesis. We will also cover how to migrate existing “closed” files like Word documents and PowerPoint presentations into more accessible plain text Markdown (or similar formats like Asciidoc), for archival, collaboration, version control, and other purposes.

Prerequisites

  • A text editor (note: not a word processor!) that can save in plain text format. We will be using the online Markdown editor Dillinger in this session. For a cross-platform editor that you can download and install on your machine a good choice is Atom.

Helpful, but not required

  • A GitHub.com or Gitlab.com account. We’ll discuss briefly how to use GitHub Pages to host a static site. For a more complete introduction to creating static sites with Github Pages, please see the Introduction to Jekyll workshop.
  • Some familiarity with working in a command line / Unix shell interface. Some of the tools we will introduce make use of the command-line, but there are usually online or graphical alternatives and this is not required. If you’d like to learn more about the command-line shell before you start, please take a look at this workshop: Introduction to the Unix Shell.
  • Some familiarity with Git and version control. If you’d like to learn more about Git and GitHub before going any further, please see this workshop: Introduction to Git and Github.

This workshop is part of the Core Skills series.

Download

You can download a PDF containing the handouts for this workshop here.