Monday, November 2, 2015

An experiment in book writing and crowdsourcing comments

I am working away at Infinity, Causation and Paradox, and am about half way to the first draft. As an experiment, I am putting all my in-progress materials on github. There is both TeX source and a periodically updated pdf file of the whole thing (click on "document.pdf" and choose "Raw").

To report bugs, i.e., philosophical errors, nonsequiturs, typos, etc., or to make improvement suggestions, click on "Issues" at the top of the github page (preferred), or just email me.

I will be committing new material to the repository after each days' work on the book. Click on the commit description to see what I've added. If you must quote from the manuscript, explicitly say that you are quoting from "an in-progress early draft".

Please bear in mind that this is super rough. A gradually growing first draft.

Please note that while you're permitted to download the material for your personal use only, you are not permitted to redistribute any material. The repository may disappear at any time (and in particular when the draft is ready for initial submission).

4 comments:

 James A. Gibson said...

That's a pretty good idea. Can you track changes to documents and do version control too with documents like that? Might not be a bad way of storing work for collaborative pieces where you and your (possible) co-authors can check in changes if so.

Alexander R Pruss said...

Indeed, there is version control, and for text based formats like LaTeX, you can nicely look at what revisions happened at each stage.

Alexander R Pruss said...

If you want to see how a revision looks like, have a look at: https://github.com/arpruss/infinity-causation-paradox/commit/1d037aa1551f837291782da3d82f8e001f08a7a4

Alexander R Pruss said...

I've been getting some really good comments by email.