

Watch a Ph.D. thesis dissertation being written in (somewhat) realtime - hds
http://theoriginaltakeaway.com/research/thesis/

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mcguire
Forget the dissertation. Nobody really reads those (really, not even my
committee).

What we want to watch in real-time is the defense. Especially the spanking
tunnel at the end.

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pagekicker
I was expecting to see the ten-year process involving teaching assistantship,
employment, marriage, and children, all illumninated by the light of a candle
at 2 am in a basement office next to the crib.

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archgrove
Whilst not as slick as the JS version, I did much the same thing with mine:
[https://vimeo.com/76969179](https://vimeo.com/76969179) when bored one day. I
couldn't find any tools to create exactly what I wanted, so knocked up
[https://gist.github.com/archgrove/6766129](https://gist.github.com/archgrove/6766129),
[https://github.com/archgrove/PDFProofSheet](https://github.com/archgrove/PDFProofSheet),
and a bunch of shell scripts to generate a folder of images. Fed this lot into
iMovie, and voila.

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Monkeyget
Related, I loved watching pg writing an essay live :
[https://code.stypi.com/hacks/13sentences](https://code.stypi.com/hacks/13sentences)

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sanderjd
That's really neat! I'm not sure if this is intentional because your work is
private, but I would love it if I could click on the images or SHAs to go
actually see the thing.

~~~
hds
At the moment I'm a little hesitant to make it public. Partly because there's
a large chunk of unpublished research in there, but also because some of the
early drafts are a little embarrassing.

Perhaps when the thesis is deposited (and hence public) I could add that in
for "historical" interest.

~~~
j2kun
Definitely don't make it public. I know people who have had their thesis
topics scooped.

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ygra
I wrote something similar while I was writing my diploma thesis, albeit not
that visual. For me it was handy to see whether I was making any progress, so
I regularly updated a CSV file with the current number of pages, lines, words,
figures, code lines, and code comments. The idea was that on every day I did
something I could at least look at the data and see how much (also the script
automatically adjusted page, line and word count for the appendix which I
didn't want to count).

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burritofanatic
Excellent! People writing important papers really should be using Git. When
documents are extremely complex, previously removed portions can have
pertinence later.

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Fomite
This doesn't work particularly well for fields not using LaTeX as their
document creation tool.

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dovel
Why is that?

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jaredsohn
I would think the GP means that git works much better if you are creating a
document in a non-binary format (of which LaTeX is one example.)

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muhfuhkuh
This is really cool stuff. Reminds me of a stripped down version of notch's
live coding sessions for Ludum Dare.

Any reason you chose LaTeX as your content dev language and publishing over
something a little "easier" like DocBook XML and Publican (which uses LaTeX as
an intermediate build language to create PDFs)? Is it required, what you're
used to, or purity of notation?

~~~
hds
Partly it's what I'm used to, but I've yet to find anything "easier" for the
large amount of mathematics I typeset. There is a lot of notation and very
little graphics or difficult formatting.

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CaRDiaK
Why am I obsessing over the arrow not quite lining up on the points of time?
Until the fourth tick, then following some pattern..

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clarkmoody
While you mention that you are hesitant to release the content of the
dissertation prematurely, could you instead release the build tools you used
to make your "flatplans"?

It would be a huge help to those of us about to write our dissertations :-)

~~~
hds
The code is horrible, but it's here: [https://github.com/hds/repo-flatplan-
animation](https://github.com/hds/repo-flatplan-animation)

You'll find the JS bits in the repository for the website which is there too.

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apepe
You could do it in Authorea (Git+LaTeX) and actually show us what you are
writing too!

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toppy
That's an excellent solution for big problem in my country (not at PhD level
though) namely plagiarism. Make students to use such system, turn autocommit
on and you can see their progress and all deviations (big chunks of text
appearing from nowhere etc.).

~~~
doctorKrieger
once they learn about it nothing will change.

