While being a social media Luddite has many perks, it does mean occasionally missing out on an interesting thing until a resident of those walled gardens points it out to you. Most recently this was a post by Hadas Kotek about her decision to leave the field after several years in temp positions. She gives a detailed account of how she reached that decision, and I’m happy to see that it got a lot of positive feedback. However, there’s one thing that rubs me the wrong way about this whole incident, and that’s the implicit assumption that leaving the field is something that needs to be justified. If anything, it should be staying in the field that needs justification!

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Alright, let’s assume you’ve followed the instructions in the previous two posts on pandoc and the metadata header. You have a beautiful article that’s ready to be posted on the Outdex. But how do you get it there? The simplest option is to email it as an attachment to submissions@outde.xyz. One of the maintainers (probably me) will handle the backend stuff and send you a link to a preview version. If you’re happy with the preview, your article goes live. Otherwise, you mail in a revised version.

This process should work fine for simple documents that don’t need a lot of revising. But for those of you who are familiar with Github, we have a much slicker alternative.

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Yesterday at Stony Brook, we concluded an informal workshop on computational phonology, which focused on theoretical, logical, model-theoretic, and automata-theoretic aspects of phonology (and some syntax). Here ‘informal’ means the workshop itself has no advanced schedule of talks, nor are there any talks except for the co-located Linguistics Colloquium and Frontiers series talks. Instead we list topics we are interested in presenting and presenters lead discussion, utilizing the whiteboard and as much time as they want, or until the group becomes restless. We take breaks when we want, and have plenty of time to ask questions, talk with each other, and get to see what we are working on. Personally, I find it very refreshingly different from national and international conferences which (perhaps necessarily) come with a planned schedule of tighly-timed talks, Q&A and so on.

I wanted to take a moment to sumarize some of the big picture issues that emerged for me over the past couple of days.

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This is the second post on how to write submissions for the Outdex. The first one covered the use of pandoc for the actual content of your submission. However, a blog post is more than just its content. It also involves crucial metadata such as the author(s), the date it was published, or topic tags. Metadata also allows you to enable some advanced features. It’s a very powerful tool, but also very easy to use. All you have to do is add a short YAML-header at the very top. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t despair, it only takes 4 minutes to learn.

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This is the first post in an ongoing series of mini-tutorials for Outdex contributors. I’ll give a brief overview of some of the lovely pandoc features that authors can use for their outdex articles: formatting with markdown, syntax highlighting, Latex-style math, bibtex-style citations, and example numbering.

In the near future, there will be follow-up posts that cover the use of YAML headers for metadata, how to submit articles via Github, and some aspects of the talkyard commenting system we use. If anything’s unclear, please leave a comment.

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Time to bring in the toys.

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