The Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM) is one of the world’s largest annual gatherings for free software advocates (like myself) and developers to share and discuss our work. Because the meeting was virtual this year (in response to the pandemic), I was blessed with the opportunity to participate by pre-recording a presentation.
Overall, I found FOSDEM to be an enriching experience. The organizers did excellent work, and all of the presentations that I attended were quite engaging. FOSDEM’s return to form as an in-person conference in Brussels will make it challenging for me to return, but I hope to do so.
Per FOSDEM’s brilliant, fair guidelines, my presentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Belgium License (CC BY 2.0 BE). Anyone is free to copy, modify, and/or distribute some or all of this presentation, but I must be given due credit.
Here I share both the video recording of my presentation as it is housed permanently on the FOSDEM website and the full script (from which I only deviated slightly during the actual recording). I have added hyperlinks throughout the text. Enjoy.
Deus vos benedicat,
Corey J. Stephan
FOSS for the Professional Historian: Optimizing a Multisouce Historical Research Workflow in BSD or GNU/Linux with a Tiling Window Manager and Manuscripts Galore
Corey Stephan
February 6, 2021
For historical research and writing, the use of a dedicated tiling window manager and other customizable FOSS tools improves efficiency. With a bit of work, manuscript facsimiles, database query tools, and other items that a historian might need to have opened simultaneously can be sorted exactly how he/she wishes, freeing crucial time from organization for proper analysis. In this presentation, I explain how to optimize a multisource historical research workflow inside a tiling window manager with an entirely libre software toolkit.
Hello, everyone. My name is Corey Stephan, and I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Theology at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. My presentation is titled “Free and Open Source Software for the Professional Historian: Optimizing a Multisource Historical Research Workflow in BSD or GNU/Linux with a Tiling Window Manager and Manuscripts Galore.” Thank you for having me.
Many professional historians research and write with rather haphazard desktop or laptop computer setups. Perhaps it is natural that the sort of mind that thrives on piecing together minutia from historical documents tends to be different from the sort of mind that thrives on learning to use cutting-edge technology.
However, the busy scholar cannot afford to work without keeping as many tools for efficient research and writing in her toolbox as possible. For example, the operating system for a historian working with myriad large documents ought to lightweight and stable. I have had my Ryzen-powered desktop with 16GB of RAM crash because I was manipulating a manuscript facsimile that used 13GB on its own, and I have had a regression in LibreOffice Fresh render a work-in-progress dissertation chapter unable to be edited until I downgraded to LibreOffice Still. Neither moment was pleasant. Most big name open source operating systems that are not completely rolling release are well suited for the job, such as FreeBSD, Debian, or Manjaro, but the scholar must take care to use long-term service kernels and software whenever reasonably possible.
Beside the operating system, the window manager is the most important part of the historian’s toolbox. For multisource historical research and writing, the use of a dedicated tiling window manager can improve efficiency quite dramatically. Manuscript facsimiles, database query tools, and other items that one might need to have opened simultaneously in various windows are placed exactly where one intends rather than in a random location (like in stacking window managers and, therefore, most traditional desktop environments). Moreover, no windows are allowed to overlap, and each window occupies all the screen space allotted to it.
There are dozens of tiling window managers available for the X Window System atop the BSDs and GNU/Linux. Generally, they can be placed inside one of two broad categories: manual and dynamic. Manual tiling window managers, which require the user to specify exactly where each window ought to be placed, have an advantage with regard to precision. Yet they tend to be too tedious for multisource historical workflows. Dynamic tiling window managers, which position windows automatically, are both simpler to use and more efficient for the kinds of tasks that we undertake. 100% accuracy is less important for the scholar than being able to have a lot of windows open at one time without any overlap. Thus, I recommend a dynamic tiling window manager.
As for which of the many dynamic tiling window managers is best, I must remind my audience at the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting that most of us professionally studying history are not software developers. Thus, window managers that require deep programming or scripting to customize are not viable. Among the many perfectly fine remaining options, the ubiquitous i3wm and the lesser-known spectrwm are noteworthy because they have human-readable, plain text configuration files, which are almost as familiar at first look for a historian accustomed to reading ancient lists in ancient languages as I imagine that they are for a system administrator accustomed to editing FreeBSD’s beautiful kernel configuration parameters.
These are the two window managers that I am going to showcase today, using my current workflow—within which I combine the two—as a case study. On my desktop, I run i3wm, and on my laptop, I run spectrwm. I use my laptop as an extension of my main desktop workflow with the open source KVM switch imitator ‘barrier,’ which allows me to seamlessly use the same keyboard and mouse with both.
Here is my blank i3wm desktop setup on my 27” 4K display. There is quite a bit of screen real estate, but smooth workspace switching is still helpful. I have my recording tools on Workspace 8, for example, to leave 7 Workspaces for what I am about to show.
The center of my workflow is the glorious triad of LibreOffice, Firefox, and the citation management tool Zotero, each of which I open with a quick keystroke. All that I have to do is type MOD+CTRL+Z to open Zotero, then MOD+CTRL+L to open LibreOffice, and finally MOD+SHIFT+F to open Firefox. There are many ways to automate this in most tiling window managers, including i3, but I find that I like to open each application window on my own—just a little less automation for the sake of being able to decide exactly what I would like to have running during a given study session.
I do all of my writing in LibreOffice Writer (Still branch) with light text on a dark background. As an example, here is my presentation for today.
I use extensions for LibreOffice to help with spellchecking my various research languages. The Ancient Greek extension deserves special praise for its wide array of features and decent accuracy with the range of Greek that I need to quote (from Koine to Byzantine). The Latin, French, and German dictionaries that I have installed are all quite helpful, as well. (Thousands of extensions and templates for LibreOffice are available in the official repository.)
It might sound obvious to use Firefox (as probably almost everyone here does), but there is more to it when it comes to scholarship than simply using a good Web browser. Extensibility is what makes Firefox amazingly powerful for academic research and writing. I have 13 extensions and 9 userscripts installed in Firefox on my desktop, most of which help me with work in some way. These include tweaks for the Desire2Learn learning management system that my university uses, Markdown Here so that I can write most HTML5 messages in plain Markdown, Refined GitHub to help me navigate resources on everybody’s favorite octocat, and more. For dissertation writing, the official Zotero extension and LeechBlock are two of the most important extensions. The former pairs my Web browser with my citation management tool, and the latter helps me stay focused on the task at hand rather than wasting time on multimedia websites.
Zotero handles Chicago Style Notes and Bibliography (Humanities) citations quite well. The official Zotero extensions for Firefox and LibreOffice work together so smoothly, in fact, that occasionally I am able to add an entry to my dissertation’s running list of works cited from my home institution’s library website in Firefox with one click and then actually cite it in the target location with one more. Otherwise, I might have to spend a few minutes with cleanup inside Zotero, but then I do not have to worry about the particular source being cited properly for the rest of the dissertation—save odds and ends like dashes, semicolons, and italics.
Beyond LibreOffice, Firefox, and Zotero, each scholar will need to use his/her own specific research tools. I have found GitHub and GitLab to be the best places to search for them. I am specifically a historical theologian, which means that I study Catholic theology in history. Thus, I often run searches to see what kinds of utilities people are writing for theology, religion, etc. For anyone who might be interested to read what my favorite projects of that kind are, please feel free to visit the “awesome-theology” list that I have made on GitHub.
One of many things that is specific to my work is the need for aids for analyzing different translations of various parts of the Bible. I use both graphical user interface and command line interface biblical study tools. For GUI, I use either BibleTime or Xiphos, depending on whether I am using a mostly Qt or mostly GTK setup, respectively. At the core, BibleTime and Xiphos are both GUI frontends for the SWORD Project.
Here I am showcasing BibleTime. There is nothing quite like having Greek, Latin, German, and English versions of a particular passage open side-by-side for comparison with the ability to copy and paste any of the text. I keep the CLI tools permanently open on my laptop.
Here is my typical window configuration in the simple spectrwm installation that I have on my laptop, pulled up by trusty old x11vnc.
You will see that I have three CLI Bibles open: grb, “Greek Bible,” which contains the full texts of the Septuagint and the Greek New Testament – for example, here is Mark 1; vul, which contains the full text of the Vulgate Latin Bible; and kjv, which contains the full text of the King James Version (English Bible).
I also make extensive use of William Whitaker’s Words, an old, trusted Latin word parsing tool that is kept alive by a dedicated group of users and developers in one central GitHub repository.
Finally, I have various shell aliases on both systems to launch what I need automatically. For example, if I need to open St. Thomas Aquinas’s opera omnia (complete works) in the elinks CLI Web browser (hosted locally), I simply type ‘tom.’ If I need to open ranger directly to the file directory in which I keep all of my dissertation documents, I type ‘diss.’ A minute saved here, a few seconds saved there, and by the end of the day, I have saved enough time to accomplish a little task that I otherwise would not have been able to accomplish.
Minus the fact that I am required by circumstances at my home institution to use Microsoft Teams for communication, my historical research and writing software toolkit is 100% libre. Moreover, it is highly efficient—not despite the fact that, but, rather, precisely because all of its contents are free and open source software. Being able to customize every piece of software in my toolkit means that I can make it my own toolkit, specifically optimized for my own work.
For the next 3 minutes, I will respond to questions. Please feel free to ask anything that you might like to ask. Thank you.
Tags: i3wm spectrwm