I interrupt my series of posts reviewing my recent publications on Pasyon and Revolution to briefly touch on the subject of LaTeX and its use in the humanities.
When I embarked on the writing of my doctoral dissertation, I was confronted by the question of with what software I would write. I knew that I would be managing an immense number of citations and had no desire to write the entire work in Word or LibreOffice Write.
I have happily used LibreOffice for short articles, letters, and other minor projects, but I knew that this would require a sophisticated adaptability calibrated to the needs of scholarship. I began looking into the use of LaTeX.
There was an initial, rather steep learning curve to LaTeX for me, but the results have more than compensated for this effort. I have been able to seamlessly manage a thousand separate sources which were incorporated into an neatly formatted 950 page final document. LaTeX made writing a distraction free affair, in which I could focus on producing content and set aside formatting for a separate stage in the process.
Here is a snippet from the opening of my main tex file which pulls together and compiles the document class I created, JPSDissertation.cls, the bibliography, JPSDissertation.bib., and all of the seventy-eight chapters, five appendices, and three indices, including numerous images, maps, and tables.
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\documentclass[a4paper]{JPSDissertation} \title{Crisis of Revolutionary Leadership: The Communist Parties of the Philippines, 1959-1974} \author{Joseph Scalice} \degreeyear{2017} \degreesemester{Summer} \degree{Doctor of Philosophy} \chair{Associate Professor Jeffrey Hadler} \othermembers{Professor Peter Zinoman \\ Professor Andrew Barshay} \field{South and Southeast Asian Studies} \bibliography{./Data/JPSDissertation} \begin{document} \maketitle % \approvalpage \copyrightpage \include{./Chapters/abstract} |
The end result was not only in compliance with the requirements of UC Berkeley for doctoral dissertations, but also, I believe, elegant.
I have made the code of both my master’s thesis and my doctoral dissertation available on Bitbucket.
I wrote my entire dissertation in Vim. My sources are maintained in a bibtex file.
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@Book{Sison1972, Title = {{Struggle for National Democracy}}, Author = {Sison, Jose Ma.}, Publisher = {Amado V. Hernandez Memorial Foundation}, Year = {1972}, Address = {Manila} } @Book{Guerrero1971a, Title = {{Philippine Society and Revolution}}, Author = {Sison, Jose Ma.}, Publisher = {Ta Kung Pao}, Year = {1971}, Address = {Hong Kong}, Nameaddon = {Amado Guerrero, \bibstring{pseudonym}}, Shorthand = {PSR}, userc = {sison:guerrero} } @Article{Sison1971c, Title = {{A Brief Comment to my Detractors}}, Author = {Sison, Jose Ma.}, Journal = {\shorthandcite{AsiaPhilippinesLeader}}, Year = {1971}, Month = {06}, Pages = {4, 56}, Day = {11}, Entrysubtype = {magazine} } |
I found using git to be extremely useful for version control and keeping tabs on my progress. I used git branches to make major revisions to my dissertation. Thus I could on one branch maintain a stable copy of my work in progress that I could distribute if needed, while on a separate branch I could make major modifications and only merge the branches when the modifications had reached a presentable stage.
For those interested in working with LaTeX on a longer academic work in the humanities, I would encourage you to review the code. I will occasionally on this site go over certain points in the code that I created that I believe will be particularly helpful for other scholars.
