[emacs-humanities] Why Emacs-humanities?

[Paul W. Rankin]

Why Emacs-humanities?

A few people have raised this question so as the person who put forth 
the proposal, the blame likely lies with me. And so, I'll attempt to 
articulate the motivation...

I've long suspected there to be a modest number of people who use Emacs 
for things wholly unrelated to programming, and that for such people 
their interest in programming might (currently) be little to zero. It's 
understandable that people without an interest in programming are 
unlikely to participate in the preexisting GNU lists associated with 
Emacs, which mostly take a programming focus.

It also seemed that many if not most of this group operated in or around 
the Humanities, or Liberal Arts (although being firmly rooted in the 
domain myself, I plausibly suffer from confirmation bias), e.g. people 
using Emacs to write their PhDs, research projects, novels, screenplays, 
etc.

EmacsConf 2020 [1] appeared to confirm this, both in its selection of 
topics, and the concurrent discussions on IRC/Matrix. The recent Emacs 
Survey [2] also showed that more than two-thirds the number of 
respondents who use Emacs for software development use it for writing, 
or if you add "research writing", the tallies between software and 
writing are almost equal. Over 600 respondents said they did not use 
Emacs for software development at all.

I'd posit there are still more people who otherwise work with text and 
are stifled by their mainstream non-free tools, but feel that the free 
software alternatives are intended only for programmers.

What I thought was needed was for GNU to send a strong signal that the 
doors are open to people using free software, i.e. Emacs, even if 
they're not currently interesting in programming, and for this 
invitation to be specific, i.e. Emacs within the Humanities, rather than 
vague.

I'd also like to single out a couple of people working in this 
Emacs-Humanities space...

Co-moderator Protesilaos Stavrou [3] is the author of the wonderful 
Modus Emacs themes, which are designed to conform with accessibility 
standards, while he also publishes essays and books on various -isms 
("On nihilism, scepticism, absolutism" has caught my eye.)

Leo Vivier (zaeph) [4], is an English teacher in France working in 
Literature and Media/Visual Studies, who was one of the 
organisers/presenters for EmacsConf 2020 and is a maintainer of (among 
others) Org-Roam. Leo is currently facilitating the Emacs Research 
Group, which is investigating ways in which Emacs is or can be used in 
academic and government research.

For those interested in where my own work overlaps with Emacs:
Fountain Mode - A major mode for screenwriting in Fountain plain-text 
markup
https://git.skeletons.cc/fountain-mode/about/
Binder - A global minor mode facilitating multi-file writing projects
https://git.skeletons.cc/binder/about/
Olivetti - A minor mode to automatically balance window margins
https://git.skeletons.cc/olivetti/about/

Finally, let me say that I have no real plan for the direction of 
discussions on this list, nor do I want to be viewed as anything more 
than the random guy who suggested it. I hope that topics of discussion 
grow organically. I'm sure that subscribers will be interested in 
hearing about your projects using Emacs in the Humanities, your 
approaches to certain problems, questions, ideas, recent discoveries, 
etc.

[1] https://emacsconf.org/2020/
[2] https://emacssurvey.org/2020/
[3] https://protesilaos.com/
[4] https://zaeph.net

--
PWR

The single best thing you can do for the world is delete your social 
media accounts.