One of the reasons why I have started this blog is to make a portfolio of my work.
I have long admired how folks working in artistic or design fields have been able to neatly wrap up their work in largely a visual format — whether it be old school vellum and paper, or the latest 3D visualization tools. After many years hanging with my sister in architecture studios and witnessing this firsthand, I have thought about doing the same with my own stuff.
Well, turns out it is not so easy…if you are an engineer / software developer / even product designer, it seems like your work output is not easily archived; screw the work flow, even the process of working is hard to archive. For example, if you write software, one could argue that archiving it is simply a matter of source control. You would have all the changes to the source, and build scripts to try out the final thing. But what if the code doesn’t really work — like it crashes before it gives any sort of indication that it did something? And what about the thought process that got you there, is that captured in your source? Also, who is the intended audience? What if there are really interesting ideas in your project, but your audience doesn’t understand the language it is written in? I guess the question is really how much more work do I have to do for all this to be reasonably archived by me for others?
Well, I thought I would tackle an easier task — archiving technical papers I have written. It’s a paper, what’s hard about that? Well, like many technical papers, I wrote mine using the fantastic LaTex markup language. Really one of the first widely used markup languages, LaTex is extremely powerful, produces beautiful photo-ready output, and dutifully follows the “separate the content from the design” ethos. Any because it is a markup language, the LaTex community has made a number of LaTex output converters: HTML, PDF, etc. However, it really hasn’t been maintained — this HTML converter has a last revision of 2001. How about LaTex to Wordpress? Not a chance. *
But more to the point, why do I think publishing my work via this blog is the right way to archive it? Well, blogs get searched, and blogs get linked to, and blogs get syndicated to you, the reader. This means your new document storage and retrieval system is a web search. And if my blog page goes down for good? Well the contents of this site are frequently archived duplicated by crawlers. This may be an obvious point to some, but if I don’t do this, my published work will fall victim to the one-way black hole of “academic portals”.
Go ahead, search for one of my papers using google scholar. Just try to find a full copy of it without opening your wallet. That’s right, IEEE, ACM and most others charge to gain access past the abstract. I have nothing against these associations helping offset costs, but putting a fortress around the information seems to work against the whole academic process, right?
So on this site I’ll post abstracts, links to full PDFs (that I host), as well as upload the contents to services like scribd. I’ll try to give an introduction for each, to give the content a broader audience, so please give them a gander. But regardless — copy away, Intertubes, copy away…
* I would like to give props to this great LaTex-Wordpress resource page, which allowed me to put at least a few equations (but not entire document conversions) quite easily inside posts.
Image from this fellow’s impressive record archive