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Course description
This practical, hands-on, exercise-focused tutorial focuses specifically on how to use Markdown when producing academic work, regardless of whether you are writing a short paper or a book. It is aimed at both those who have no prior experience of using Markdown as well as users who have encountered the language before.
The course covers basic and extended Markdown, including how to use a reference manager such as Zotero and Citation Style Language to help you speed up and better manage referencing. It also introduces additional LaTeχ packages for more advanced features such as an index or glossaries. After the course, attendants will be able to produce a document fit for publication and in accordance with academic requirements. This document can then be used as a template for future work.
Academic writers must often make a hard choice between expensive, often uncooperative software such as Microsoft Word, or options that allow a lot of control but come with a steep learning curve, such as LaTeχ. Markdown’s learning curve is much gentler, not least because it is used in many common chat applications. It offers many of the same benefits as LaTeχ, including a significant reduction in layouting effort. Another benefit is the flexibility in output formats – Markdown can easily be transformed into an HTML, DOCX or PDF.
Using Markdown for academic writing, however, requires features that go beyond basic Markdown. Bibliographies, footnotes, image captions and links to different parts of the document are just some of the requirements. Advanced features like glossaries are often desirable for longer works like doctoral theses or books. But, crucially, all of these can be learnt with a little bit of practice.
This tutorial will soften that learning curve so that you can enjoy the benefits of using Markdown in your own academic writing and free up time for you to do the research.
Target audience
Students and researchers at any level of their education/career in all fields
Learning outcomes
- An understanding of how structured text and markup languages, specifically Markdown, operate;
- How markup languages support distraction-free writing;
- How to use Markdown to produce academic work;
- How to use a reference manager to keep track of literature and produce bibliographies in combination with a markdown document;
- How to make use of LaTeχ packages for more advanced features such as indexes or glossaries.
Prerequisites
- Beginner-friendly
- Experienced participants are welcome to join for a refresher
Required materials
- Laptop with MiKTeX or TeX Live installed (downloadable via UiO’s software center, https://miktex.org/ or https://tug.org/texlive/)
- Plain text or Markdown editor installed (preferably Zettlr from https://www.zettlr.com/, but Visual Studio Code, KATE, Ghostwriter also work)
- Recent installation of Pandoc (https://pandoc.org/)
Lunch
- There will be a complementary buffet-lunch at 12:00-13:00 from the Sverdrups spiseri (Georg Sverdrups Hus, 2nd floor).
- After you get your lunch, join us at Store møterom where we have reserved seats for #DSDays2027 participants.
Number of participants
15
Contact
If you have any questions regarding this course, or anything else about the DSDays 2027 event, please contact us per email: digitalscholarship@ub.uio.no