We’ve been spending a lot of class time discussing the complete uncharted territory of the preservation of digital records. In my pre-5007 ignorance, I assumed that writing a document in Microsoft Word was fool-proof. We can, of course, take the attitude that our files will be around long enough for when we will need it. At this point in my academic career, it seems unfathomable that some day someone may desperately need to read papers/notes etc that I wrote. I seems to me that thinking of sustainable authorship needs to be done on a higher level beyond our individual needs. It’s not just one person writing their files in plain text Markdown, it’s making people aware that there are other options. Microsoft Word is only popular because everyone uses it.

On the other hand, without any personal experience in the horror stories of losing data, it is easy for me to say that as an individual writing un-important things I do not need a long-term sustainable syntax like Markdown. Like poor records management, it may not be a problem until something happens.

At this point in my digital history skills, everything is taking time. It takes longer to learn Markdown and start using it than it does to write up a quick document in Microsoft Word. We’re all busy people and love things that save us time. Markdown may not save us time in the short-term, but the future is unknown and could save countless hours of re-writing in the future. The programs we have been working with this week, particularly Zotero have an immediate and obvious time-saving benefit.

In an effort to make Markdown more individually functional for myself, I decided after January 25’s class to write a 1-page reflection assignment for my historical theory course in Markdown using Sublime. I learned a few things through the process. One, that Sublime has no preview or word count function that I could find so Atom may be a better choice. Another that separating the content from the form didn’t really do much to improve my free flow of writing. In this case, my assignment had to be exactly one page, a difficult thing to do with no idea of your word count as you’re going. I ended up finishing my last paragraph writing in Word rather than Sublime, to make sure I didn’t go over my word count.

For me, the benefits of Markdown are more apparent in an assignment like this one and other types of short reflections. You want to release your thoughts and not worry about style. Kind of like a stream of consciousness. For an assignment that requires more style and organization right off the bat, Microsoft Word ended up being the final stop of my writing. That being said, in Markdown I was able to add a quick link for further information on the scholar I was discussing. If this made my assignment better or not, I can’t be sure but I did end up with a good mark. Adding this link with Markdown was much easier than figuring it out in Microsoft Word and it transfered perfectly into PDF form. I did however take a shortcut and change it into a PDF through Microsoft Word because that’s where I finished the piece.

Overall, it becomes an issue of what works for me personally and what doesn’t. Combining Microsoft Word and Markdown may not be the best path to choose, but it was my best option for what I needed.