Jupyter Notebook (Used in Lucretius Comparison_

SUNDAY WEEKLY ZOOM - 12:30 PM EDT - Ancient Text Study: De Rerum Natura by Lucretius -- Meeting is open to Level 03 members and above -- Read the agenda for December 14, 2025 by clicking here.

    It looks like the full PDF of the paper is here:

    lucretius-translations-comparison/HMatulis-DH-Project-Course-Lucretius-Translations-Comparison.pdf at main · haraldsDev/lucretius-translations-comparison
    DH Project course – Comparison of 6 English translations of Lucretius “De rerum natura” -…
    github.com

    Boy this guy is good -- writing it and uploading it to github for revisions. This is a great way to take advantage of technology to do things! TauPhi and Cleveland Okie It looks like he isn't really taking advantage of github for revisions, but this is the start of the way to publish a paper and then work on it collaboratively with extremely fine grained control over what revisions are accepted in to the main trunk of the paper.

    I am not familiar with this project but it looks like he prepared it in this format --

    Project Jupyter
    The Jupyter Notebook is a web-based interactive computing platform. The notebook combines live code, equations, narrative text, visualizations, interactive…
    jupyter.org

    After looking through the PDF this looks more like a "science project" to parse through particular words by computerized means and then compare them. I note that the six translations are listed only at the end of the document and even then by year and not by author.

    No doubt there is some great stuff in here but it's not a general summary of the different translations for high-level comparison.

    However the very fact of how he is approaching the project and the technology he is using may lead to some useful observations. We definitely need a better way to work collaboratively, and to process revisions in master documents, then purely using Google docs. Some combination of Jupiter / github might work for that.

    I haven't used Git much but based on my limited knowledge of it I think it can be a great tool for collaboration. As far as Jupyter is concerned, it wouldn't be my first choice. Not that I have anything against it (I don't know it at all) but I think markdown would be far better to work with for these reasons:

    • simplicity - markdown is basically plain text so it's super easy to work with and integration with Git version control would be easier as well
    • versatility - markdown files can be edited on any platform using any editor so collaborators are not tied down to one, single option

    Regarding Git server, I'd choose something like GitLab over GitHub. This is solely based on my aversion to software corporations (and GitHub belongs to Microsoft as far as I'm aware). I'm sure GitHub is fine but I wouldn't be myself if I didn't try to convince people to use alternatives.

    I agree with all your comments.

    I looked quickly enough at jupyter to see that it does use markdown, so I am not really sure what advantages it offers over a wiki-like or other solution that maybe tracks revisions, but really the git does that i think. so I really am not sure what even are the selling points of Jupyter.

    And like you I have enough general knowledge of git to be dangerous, but I've never really understood how it works or all the master and branching and cloning and updating options. I've tried looking into some GUIs to help with that, but they haven't proved educational enough to get me using it -- yet. The idea and method seems to be very popular though so it will probably be worth keeping at it to figure it out one day.

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