An Open Research Notebook Workflow with Scrivener and Github | Electric Archaeology

"I like Scrivener. I *really* like being able to have my research and my writing in the same place, and most of all, I like being able to re-arrange the cards until I start to see the ideas fall into place. I’m a bit of a visual learner, I suppose. (Which makes it ironic that I so rarely provide screenshots here. But I digress). What I’ve been looking for is a way to share my research, my lab notes, my digital ephemera in a single notebook. Lots of examples are out there, but another criterion is that I need to be able to set something up that my students might possibly be able to replicate. So my requirements: 1. Visually see my notes, their layout, their possible logical connections. The ability to rearrange my notes provides the framework for my later written outputs. 2. Get my notes (but not all of the other bits and pieces) onto the web in such a way that each note becomes a citable object, with revision history freely available. 3. Ideally, that could then feed into some sort of shiny interface for others’ browsing – something like Jeckyll, I guess – but not really a big deal at the moment. So #1 is taken care of with Scrivener. Number 2? I’m thinking Github. Number 3? We’ll worry about that some other day. There are Scrivener project templates that can be dropped into a Github repository (see previous post). You would create a folder/repo on your computer, drop the template into that, and write away to your hearts content, committing and syncing at the end of the day. This is what you’d get. All those slashes and curly brackets tell Scrivener what’s going on, but it’s not all that nice to read. (After all, that solution is about revision history, not open notebooks) ..."