Uses This

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Lincoln Mullen and I'm a historian at George Mason University. I teach and write about American religious history; at the moment I'm writing a history of people who converted between religions in the nineteenth-century United States. I'm also a digital historian at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. I'm responsible for teaching a graduate course on computer programming for historians, for which I'm writing a book (still very much a rough draft) on using R for digital history.

What hardware do you use?

I have a 15" MacBook Pro with an Intel i7 processor, an SSD, and 16 GB of RAM provided by my department. I also use a ThinkPad T430 which was my main machine during graduate school. There is an unremarkable Dell external monitor on my desk. I have an iPhone 5C but I more and more dislike using a phone for anything.

I really like my Timbuk2 Command Laptop messenger; I wouldn't change a thing about it.

And what software?

I used to play around with software much too often. Now I've settled down with a few organizing principles influenced by Mike Gancarz's Linux and the Unix Philosophy: I use Unix-style tools and store my data in plain text or flat files. Everything that I write is formatted in Markdown using the Pandoc extensions. John MacFarlane's Pandoc is peerless for converting between markup formats. I use some custom LaTeX templates with Pandoc. I use Vim, often in the terminal but usually in MacVim, for all text editing. Every project - writing, coding, you name it - is kept under version control with Git and almost always made available on GitHub. Almost every project is built by GNU Make. All of that is run through the shell, usually ZSH. My dotfiles and Vim files are available on GitHub.

I used to write in several different programming languages, but now I use R if at all possible. It took me some getting used to R and functional programming, but R really is a beautiful language for data analysis. It is made even better by the "Hadleyverse" of packages written by Hadley Wickham, such as dplyr, tidyr, and ggplot2. I use Yihui Xie's knitr package to write and code together in R Markdown. RStudio (in Vim mode) is my only exception to the rule about using Vim for everything; it is a very nicely done IDE for R. Even better, I can use the server version of RStudio on a much more powerful machine, or for teaching a workshop, and get the same interface. If I can't write it in R, then I use Ruby, which is also beautiful. JavaScript is not beautiful, but Mike Bostock's D3.js is; I use it for interactive data visualizations and maps.

For managing citations I use Zotero, an excellent open-source application and web service by my colleagues at RRCHNM. My notes are written in Markdown, stored in Git, and edited in Vim, but they are turned into a wiki by Gitit.

For most websites, like my personal site or my course syllabi, I use Jekyll. Jekyll is a static site generator written in Ruby so I'm comfortable writing plugins for it; it uses Markdown (with a Pandoc plugin) so I can write in plain text and keep the site under version control. For any kind of web exhibit or other scholarly website I use Omeka (think WordPress for galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and scholars). Omeka is also created by my colleagues at RRCHNM. If I assign students to write blog posts, then I use WordPress. I've been really pleased with Reclaim Hosting, which provides hosting to educators and students.

The ThinkPad runs Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Whenever I spool up a cloud or local virtual machine, it runs Ubuntu. I often use Vagrant with VirtualBox to create development environments. Homebrew is obligatory for installing development dependencies on a Mac.

I use a few Mac or web apps: iTerm2 as a terminal emulator; OmniFocus for task management, which I could probably use better; BackBlaze for online backups; DropBox for file syncing; Caffeine to keep my monitor from going to sleep while I'm teaching; QGIS for GIS work if I really must; Transmit for FTP and Amazon S3; TextExpander for snippets; Spectacle for window management; Feedly for reading feeds.

My open-source or open-access licenses of choice are MIT for software and CC-BY for prose.

What would be your dream setup?

I have plenty of computing power and can rent more cheaply. I don't even have much to complain about when it comes to battery power. I wish that there was a way to teach students digital methods without going through the grime of setting up a development environment.

I've never found an e-reader that I liked. I want a device with a large-enough screen approaching an 8.5" by 11" piece of paper that could read e-books and PDFs of journal articles, nineteenth-century books, and students papers with equal ease, preferably with an e-ink screen. Is that too much to ask?

And most of all, I'd like more and more academic work in history and the humanities to be released online (in pre-prints like arXiv, or in final versions) in open formats and hopefully under open-access licenses.