Pynk My Stylo
This evocatively named project will explore potential connections between Stylo and the Pink My Pad service. The primary objective is to broaden Stylo’s practices by opening them up to other modes of writing and publishing.
Issues
Pink My Pad is a simple, lightweight service that transforms Markdown-formatted sources into static web pages. Originally designed to work with collaborative pads (such as HedgeDoc, Etherpad, HackMD, etc.), PMP is widely used across professional, associative, and academic contexts due to its collaborative nature. Pads serve an incredibly diverse range of uses: collective note-taking, project organization and management, action documentation, iterative maintenance of indexes, lists or shared data, collaborative writing, and more.
PMP was created to enable groups collaborating in these writing spaces to publish their work as simply as possible within a highly customizable and adaptable publication and reading platform.
On the other hand, Stylo was developed specifically for the scientific writing and publishing ecosystem, bridging academic publishing standards with best practices in writing and single-source publishing. Although both environments align in terms of formatting, questions arise about whether Stylo, as a scientific publishing tool, can integrate seamlessly with collaborative, work-in-progress uses more typical of pads. Can we create bridges between the pad ecosystem and Stylo’s environment, introducing new levels of freedom and collaboration to scientific writing and publishing practices?
The Pink My Stylo project aims to reconcile the collective writing practices of pads with Stylo's ecosystem. The goal is to experiment with ways to connect the spaces and timeframes of (1) editorial protocols and project governance, which pertain to collective organization, and (2) content writing and structuring, which pertain to scientific publishing.
Technical challenges
PMP and Stylo have been designed using the same technical elements: Markdown, YAML and BibTeX formats, with Pandoc as the format converter. The main technical challenge will be to exploit Stylo's API, considering either Stylo as the source of a Pink my pad page, or a Pink my pad page as the source of a Stylo document.
Special design work will be required to harmonize the metadata of the two ecosystems.
Research activities
The project is structured in several stages:
- Scripting uses: Stylo to Pink my pad and Pink my pad to Stylo
- Design and development
- Experimentation as part of a book or collective publishing project
Deliverables
- Implementation scenarios
- Prototypes
- Documentation and feedback
