Nils Bühler – Blog
On this blog, I share news and experiences from my work. The blog serves three interests. Firstly, I report on news about my research, publications, talks, or projects. Secondly, I write about effective knowledge management for researchers—workflows, tools, or strategies. And lastly, I report on my experiences with using Free and Open Source Software as a humanities researcher.
All blog posts are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Latest Blog Posts
What Makes a Good Research Workflow?
In a dissertation or other academic work, a bibliography with 300 entries is not uncommon. But even this number doesn't reflect the countless sources that go into a research project: further literature, unlisted primary sources, conference notes, and feedback from colleagues. A central task when writing a PhD thesis or an academic article is to productively relate all these individual items to each other. It's possible to manage this with pen and paper, file folders, individual Word documents, and marked PDF files. Many successful researchers do it this way. However, bringing all these sources together is the ideal use case for a digital solution. What you need is a note system that is flexible enough to adapt to complex projects, can link individual elements together, is quickly searchable, and automates repetitive tasks for you. In this blog post, I want to demonstrate why it's worth investing time in optimizing your own workflow and in a productive note-taking system.
Theses and Long Form Writing with Markdown
Many people are currently looking for alternatives to Microsoft Office Word. The most obvious option seems to be LibreOffice Writer – it does almost the same thing, but without the unnecessary (and surveillance-oriented) features and the licensing constraints of Word. For creating and formatting documents, adding citations, and inserting images, LibreOffice Writer is just as suitable as Microsoft's software. However, if you're already considering switching, why not also rethink your workflow? In this post, I want to present an alternative: Writing long form texts such as academic theses with the Markdown editor Zettlr.
Article in AKGWDS Jubilee Volume
The Working Group on Humanities Research and Digital Games (Arbeitskreis Geisteswissenschaften und Digitale Spiele, AKGWDS) has turned 10 years old and will release a jubilee volume to mark this occasion. The volume looks back at the group's most important topics of debate. I was invited to reflect on the relationship between history and digital games in these debates: What role did history in games, the history of games, and the history of game contexts play? The article is now available as an article in the AKGWDS blog.
Linux in the Humanities
I've been using Linux exclusively for about four years now. At first, this sometimes caused confusion, but things have changed. People now often ask me if I'm using Linux and how that is working out for me. Since the discussion around digital sovereignty has gained momentum, interest has only grown. In the coming weeks, I'll be sharing my experiences to give others a better sense of what switching to Linux entails. This post is a brief overview to hit things off.
Contribution to Anthology on Game History/Histories
The conference proceedings Spielgeschichte(n): Games und Game Studies in medienkulturgeschichtlicher Perspektive (Game History/Histories: Games and Game Studies in Media Cultural Historical Perspective) have just been published by transcript. In my contribution, I discuss the founding myth of Game Studies, according to which research and society did not seriously and impartially engage with digital games before 2001 (the self-proclaimed founding year of Game Studies). I discuss the function this myth had and in part still has for Game Studies, and demonstrate the extent to which it is indeed a myth.