Living documents

Jana Lasser

TU Graz & CSH Vienna

2022-12-15

Why living documents

Writing permeates all the activities of a researcher.

Writing grant proposals

Writing articles

Writing reports

Writing lecture notes

Writing minutes

...

The times when writing was a solitary activity are long gone.

Zombie documents

They are dead, they multiply and they haunt you.

Living documents are dynamically updated and can be edited by more than one person at the same time.

The challenge of concurrency

The challenge of concurrency

Example implementations

Google Docs

(Microsoft) Office documents in OneCloud or documents in Nextcloud

Overleaf or Authorea for scientific writing

Pads (HackMD, riseup) for quick and easy writing

Wikis (Wikipedia)

Prominent examples

Google Docs [grants, articles, minutes]

(Microsoft) Office documents [grants, articles, minutes]

Overleaf & Authorea [grants, articles]

Pads [idea generation, documentation]

Wikis [knowledge transfer, science communication]

Features of living documents

Parallel editing

Exporting

Access control (reading, editing)

Commenting

Version control

Reference management integration

Local hosting

Price

Exercise [15 min]

Do one out of the following:

Pick a service you don't know that could be useful for you, make an account, create a document, write a sentence, insert a comment and invite another user.

Pick a function you don't know out of [version control, reference integration, local hosting] and try to figure out how to do it for a service you regularly use.

Show & tell

→ What do you like about a particular service you use regularly?

→ How much does accessbility of a service matter to you and which services are (not) very accessible in your epxerience?

→ What file formats do you usually export to and why?