Interoperability in knowledge production and writing. Political economy and Pandoc. 🧵
| website | https://v2editor.com/ |
| created by | https://oktana.dev |
| source code | https://github.com/oktana-coop/v2 |
v2 Editor
@v2editor
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v2 is a local-first writing tool that treats your documents as evolving artifacts, preserving every version in open formats that last.
We are also developing libraries that could be of interest to the wider Pandoc community: Diffing on Pandoc documents and conversions to & from Automerge and ProseMirror.
More details and updates in our GitHub repos: https://github.com/oktana-coop.
Finally, having a programmatic integration with Pandoc brings us in a very strong position to implement features like #citations using much less effort, but also in a way that makes sense for researchers and is interoperable with existing citation technology and compliant with standards.
We decided to integrate v2 deeply with Pandoc through a programming interface so that we can leverage its magic via v2’s user interface, and this gives us really advanced capabilities when it comes to imports, exports and in how we can interoperate with other tools like Markdown editors and word processors. v2 can already export to #markdown, #html, Docx and Pandoc native format in its alpha version because of this integration.
Pandoc is traditionally used via a command line interface to convert from one document format to another, and it is really popular in the scientific community, since it is very powerful with math and citations alongside features you would typically see in a Markdown document.
Fortunately, in the domain of rich text and scientific writing, there is one tool that is very mature and can actually provide #interoperability between various representations. @pandoc provides a data model that can serve as an intermediate representation which can be used to translate the same rich text concept across different input and output formats.
We envision a future where people are not confined to a single tool when creating knowledge. Ideally, users should be able to use different tools in different parts of the creative process, collaborate with co-workers who choose different tools and build artifacts that outlast any specific tool or company that maintains it.
On one hand #productivity would radically increase if our tools were interoperable; interoperability is essentially revolutionary from a technical standpoint, and this would benefit social production as a whole, including capitalist businesses. On the other hand, capitalist businesses have to “decree universal mediocrity” and become conservative to protect their interests, being disincentivized to interoperate with others because of competition and lack of long-term thinking.
Naturally, the realm of use of a tool is often tailored to a specific part of the creative process, so we either have to go through a tedious and often lossy operation of converting the artifacts of one tool to formats that another can work with, or, even worse, there is no such capability at all, and we have to work around the limitations of the tool and use it in ways it has not been designed to be used. This is clearly antithetical to #creativity.
Reflecting on the current state of #knowledge production, the rule is that our work is confined within the walls and limitations of specific tools.