The file system and Markdown

2 February 2026

This week will provide the foundations for the remainder of the semester. We will discuss organizing research materials and introduce writing in plain text with Markdown.

Reading

• Anil Dash, How Markdown Took Over the World.
• Zachary M. Schrag, The Princeton Guide to Historical Research (Princeton University Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1pdrrc9, Chapters 11 and 12.
• Niklas Luhmann, “Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account”.

Assignment

• Download Zotero if you have not already and read over the Zotero Guide and look through Zotero’s documentation.

Activities

• Introductions and how the course works
  • Expectations
  • Commonplace book assignment
  • Final project
• Discussion: Digital humanities projects
• How are your research materials organized?
  • Zotero
  • Tropy
• Working with the file system
• Plain text and Markdown
  • File types
  • What is plain text?
  • Introduction to Markdown
    • Practice with Markdown Preview: https://markdownlivepreview.com

Resources

See the Working with plain text and Markdown syntax resources.

• John Gruber’s introduction of Markdown and its syntax
• Programming Historian: Sarah Simpkin, Getting Started with Markdown
• Markdown Style Guide
• Quarto Markdown style guide
• Pandoc attempts to be a universal document converter and provides the backend for many applications that convert Markdown to HTML, PDF, or another format.
  • Pandoc has an in-depth discussion of its flavor of Markdown syntax.
  • See also Programming Historian: Dennis Tenen and Grant Wythoff, Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown.