IQSS consultant Ista Zahn has made work with Emacs a lot easier for social scientists with a package that is now available for users.
Ista Zahn, a member of the Institute’s Research Technology Consulting (RTC) team, became an Emacs user about 10 years ago, because it offered a convenient environment for literate programming and reproducible data analysis. “I quickly discovered,” he says, “as all Emacs users do, that Emacs is a strange creature.” Through nearly 40 years of continuous development, Emacs has accumulated a great many added features, which a user must comb through in order to choose which they need for their own work. Zahn explains how he came about the Emacs setup that is now available:
In the summer of 2014 Gary King asked for an Emacs configuration with a specific set of features, and I realized that my personal Emacs configuration already provided a lot of the features he was looking for. Since that time we've worked together to turn my personal Emacs configuration into something that can be useful to other Emacs users. The result is a well-documented Emacs initialization that focuses on configuring Emacs tools commonly used by social scientists, including LaTeX, git, and R.
Ista Zahn’s Emacs package for social scientists is available for download at https://github.com/izahn/dotemacs.
RTC is a PhD consulting team that serves the Harvard/MIT social science community, performing free in-person consulting on research issues as a part of IQSS. For more information about the services offered by RTC and to make an appointment, please visit the Research Technology Consulting website.
