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Author Archives: Lincoln Mullen

April 30, 2012, 3:00 pm

Reading ‘History as a Literary Art’

By Lincoln Mullen

TyperwiterWhen I was an undergraduate taking a class on writing history, and again when I was a graduate student, a professor assigned me to read Samuel Eliot Morison’s essay “History As a Literary Art.” Morison, more than most, was a credible source of writing advice. When he wrote the essay in 1946 he had already won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea. By the end of his life, he would pick up another Pulitzer and two Bancroft Prizes. Morison was a professional historian, but he wrote squarely in the tradition of amateur, literary historians like Francis Parkman—perhaps unsurprisingly, since both were Boston blue bloods.

Morison was glad for the gains of academic history, but deplored the writing of only “dull, solid, valuable monographs,” leaving “journalists, novelists, and freelance writers” to ”extract the gold.” The question of…

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April 24, 2012, 3:00 pm

Save Articles to Read Later with Pocket

By Lincoln Mullen

Logo for PocketThere are any number of web services and apps that let you save something online to read later. Several ProfHacker authors use these services. Brian introduced us to the concept with his post back in 2009 on “Asynchronous Reading.” Amy, Natalie, and Jason have mentioned Instapaper; Erin wrote about Zite (a related application); Brian and I have written about Read It Later; and George mentioned Readability.

Read It Later recently rebranded itself as Pocket and released a substantial update. Pocket lets you save items like articles and videos to their web service. You can then read or watch the things you’ve saved on their website, or on apps for iPhone, iPad, Android devices, and the Kindle Fire. You can get a fuller overview on Pocket’s website.

Screen shot of Pocket's web app

Screen shot of Pocket's web app

The upgrade has…

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April 17, 2012, 11:00 am

VirtualBox Makes It Easy to Use Other Operating Systems

By Lincoln Mullen

VirtualBox logoOne of the current ideas about computing is that the operating system is becoming less important. With many software applications and even your data in the cloud, most of the work that you do can be done in a browser, or so the idea goes. That’s not true for me. While I do use my e-mail and calendar in Google Apps, sync my most important files to the cloud with ProfHacker favorite Dropbox, and use any number of other web applications, I still spend most of my computing time in my operating system using applications that can’t be run on a web service. For security and privacy reasons, which we’ve covered, you might not want much of your important in the cloud anyway.

From time to time, I need to run a different operating system than my OS of choice. If I’m finishing up an important web project, I like to test the website on Windows and Linux as well as on my Mac. You might want to use …

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April 12, 2012, 8:00 am

How to Fork a Syllabus on GitHub

By Lincoln Mullen

A few weeks ago Brian wrote a great post on “Forking Your Syllabus.” Borrowing from discussions with Kathy Harris and Trevor Owen, Brian advanced the idea that

syllabi could learn a trick or two from GitHub. GitHub is a repository for open source code that supports version control . . . . What this means in plain terms is that developers can share code using GitHub and then other developers can add on to that code, with the repository tracking all the changes. If a developer wants to take a piece of code down a different line of development, he or she “forks” the code. The fork shows the provenance of the code while still allowing you to adapt it to your own needs. Finding a platform to “fork your syllabus” would not only allow you to give acknowledgments to those whose work you drew on, but it would invite others to make use of your syllabus for their own…

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March 27, 2012, 8:00 am

Install Applications Easily with a Package Manager

By Lincoln Mullen

PackageWhen the Apple App Store came out, one of the features it touted was a central place to buy and install applications. You could download all your applications from one place, and when they were out of date, you could upgrade them from one place. Indeed, this is a useful feature (leaving aside discussions of the economics of such stores).

Indeed, this is a feature that users of the command line had for a long time. For command line terminals, these app stores are usually called package managers. They’re not called app stores, because the applications are free.

A package manager is a convenient way to install and update new software. Often the software you can get from a package manager runs on the command line, but you can also install some GUI applications as well.

If you’re on a computer running Linux, you already have a package manager built in. For example, if you’re on…

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March 20, 2012, 11:00 am

Make Your Own E-Books with Pandoc

By Lincoln Mullen

Book bindingAs devices for reading e-books proliferate, it increasingly makes sense to make publications available in an e-book. There are a number of cases in which you might do this:

  • If you have a blog and want to make the best posts into an e-book. For example, sociologist Kieran Healy created an e-book of posts from his blog.
  • If you have content in one format that you want to read as an e-book instead. For example, our own Mark Sample took the open-access book Hacking the Academy and turned it into several versions of an e-book for Nooks, iPads, and Kindles.
  • If you want to give your readers the option to read your content as an e-book. For example, I’m the web editor for The Journal of Southern Religion. As a supplement to the articles on the website, I intend to make an e-book of each issue with the articles “bound” together.

Making an e-book can be easy—almost trivially…

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March 12, 2012, 11:00 am

Writing Power Tools: Text Editors

By Lincoln Mullen

Vim screen shotOne of the recent themes on ProfHacker has been the virtues of using plain text to do your work, especially your writing. For me there is one big advantage: I write in plain text so that I can use a text editor to do my writing.

By text editor, I mean a program that is meant to edit code—the type of tool that programmers use. My text editor of choice is Vim, but there are many similar programs: BBEdit, Emacs, Notepad++, TextMate, TextWrangler, and SciTE are just a few of the options. These all share features that are intended to help you write code. They are not primarily software for word processing, like Microsoft Word or Libre Office.

So why would someone want to write using software that is meant for writing code rather than writing words? I’ve found that thinking about my words as if they were code has improved my process of writing. There are the…

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February 23, 2012, 11:00 am

Pandoc Converts All Your (Text) Documents

By Lincoln Mullen

Pandoc conversion networkFor the past few months we ProfHackers have been running an occasional series about using the command line. I got us started with a couple posts explaining why you might want to use the command line and how to get started using it. Konrad followed with a posts about the uniq command and the sort command for working with text and data files. Amy added a post about how the command line let her hack the NOOK Color, and I wrote about using pdftk to manipulate PDFs.

Taking up the command line is easier if you have a specific problem you’re trying to solve. For me, the problem was that I wanted to do all of my writing in a plain text format, like Markdown or LaTeX. But I need to be able to share my writing in a variety of formats: HTML for the web, PDF for printed documents or academic writing, and occasionally RTF or Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.

The best way I’ve found to move between …

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February 10, 2012, 11:00 am

Take Better Notes by Paraphrasing

By Lincoln Mullen

notesI’ve recently started doing the research for dissertation, which means I have a minor obsession with note taking. (As do many ProfHackers.) I’m not a good note taker. I must have taken notes well enough to muddle along this far, but there is a fundamental shift in the kind of research I’m doing. The notes I’m taking now need to be usable for a book-length project spanning years, rather than a semester. Indeed, I hope some of the notes I’m taking now will prove the foundation for work beyond the dissertation.

Some of the best advice I’ve read about how to take notes is from the dusty volumes on library research that were recommended to me as an undergrad. Of course some of that advice is basic: identify your source, take one note per card, etc.

The best advice about note taking that I’ve learned I got from Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff’s The Modern Researcher: paraphrase your…

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February 1, 2012, 3:00 pm

What Does Practice Look Like for You?

By Lincoln Mullen

One of the most helpful blogs I’ve read about productivity is Cal Newport’s Study Hacks, which we’ve referenced a few times before. Newport is a computer scientist and professor at Georgetown University. Besides the blog on studying, he has also written several books for undergrads on how to succeed at college.

At the heart of Newport’s writing is the simple idea that success doesn’t require courage, it requires working hard in the right way. There are a number of ideas that follow from that: for example, you have to “become so good that they can’t ignore you” and becoming that good requires “hard focus.” The idea I’ve found most helpful is that to become good you have to practice deliberately.

My work in history doesn’t have an obvious divide between practice and performance, unlike, say, musicians’ work. But there are kinds of work that I do that are like practice, in that they a…

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