Git / GitHub ?

Posted on January 2, 2014 by Patrick Murray-John

Susan posted this tweet:

Anyone else want to talk about what git and github are, and how they can be used for things other than code?

Categories: Collaboration, Crowdsourcing, Data Mining, Publishing, Session: Play, Session: Talk, Social Media, Text Mining |

About Patrick Murray-John

Ph.D. in Medieval Lit from UW-Madison, then hunted a TT track job, was Visiting Ass't Prof. at University of Mary Washington, then switched to instructional technology at UMW. Joined CHNM in February 2011. As of 2018, I'm Associate Director for Systems in the Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern Library -- woohoo! Love to talk all things Omeka, Linked Data, Drupal, Zotero. Preferably over beer.

2 Responses to Git / GitHub ?

  1. Shane Landrum says:
    January 3, 2014 at 4:09 am

    yes! I currently use git on a private repository for managing the content for my fully-online courses (syllabi, weekly assignments, etc). I also use git and a Markdown/LaTeX tool chain for handling dissertation-related tasks.

    Here’s my big problem-seeking-a-solution: I prefer to write in Markdown, but some of my material has to be written in Word/RTF formats for interaction with other staff members. Word/RTF formats aren’t as amenable to diff tools, which is a challenge when I need to run 2 parallel versions of a course. (The current, very urgent, example is that I’m teaching both an online-only and a face-to-face version of the same course, and I’m uncertain how to handle the branching required to overlap most-but-not-all of the documents.)

  2. Susan Garfinkel says:
    January 4, 2014 at 5:55 pm

    Thanks to Patrick for posting this. I was inspired by tweets coming out of a Thursday AHA session titled “The Digitally Informed Dissertation: New Questions, New Kinds of Research” (aha.confex.com/aha/2014/webprogram/Session10699.html), but haven’t yet explored Git or Github myself. That’s largely because I haven’t been involved in a large coding project that uses its versioning or sharing/repository capabilities in a more “traditional” way.

    So the discussion would start with questions like what is Git, what is Github, what is versioning and forking, how do they work with Git/Github and how might historians use them? I have some ideas on the versioning aspect. Also, we could talk about it as a repository, in comparison to other types of systems–again, I have no expertise on this question.

    Chad Black, who won’t be at THATCamp, has been using Github with his history classes. He shared a couple of links:

    “getting started with github and prose.io”
    parezcoydigo.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/getting-started-with-github-and-prose-io/

    “using bitbucket for a research repository”
    parezcoydigo.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/using-bitbucket-for-a-research-repository/

    Lincoln Mullen tweeted to say he’d also be interested in talking about this on Sunday.

    Thanks!

    Susan

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