Talks markdown generator for academicpages

Takes a TSV of talks with metadata and converts them for use with academicpages.github.io. This is an interactive Jupyter notebook (see more info here). The core python code is also in talks.py. Run either from the markdown_generator folder after replacing talks.tsv with one containing your data.

TODO: Make this work with BibTex and other databases, rather than Stuart's non-standard TSV format and citation style.


In [11]:
import pandas as pd
import os

Data format

The TSV needs to have the following columns: title, type, url_slug, venue, date, location, talk_url, description, with a header at the top. Many of these fields can be blank, but the columns must be in the TSV.

  • Fields that cannot be blank: title, url_slug, date. All else can be blank. type defaults to "Talk"
  • date must be formatted as YYYY-MM-DD.
  • url_slug will be the descriptive part of the .md file and the permalink URL for the page about the paper.
    • The .md file will be YYYY-MM-DD-[url_slug].md and the permalink will be https://[yourdomain]/talks/YYYY-MM-DD-[url_slug]
    • The combination of url_slug and date must be unique, as it will be the basis for your filenames

This is how the raw file looks (it doesn't look pretty, use a spreadsheet or other program to edit and create).


In [12]:
!cat talks.tsv









7	"Not playing that game": An Exploratory Study of Queer Men's Health Information Behavior on Location-Aware Dating and Sex-Seeking Mobile Applications	poster	project-fair	SILS Project Fair	2018-04-13	"Chapel Hill, NC"	https://academic.mattweirick.com/files/matthewjohnson.silsfairposter.pdf

Import TSV

Pandas makes this easy with the read_csv function. We are using a TSV, so we specify the separator as a tab, or \t.

I found it important to put this data in a tab-separated values format, because there are a lot of commas in this kind of data and comma-separated values can get messed up. However, you can modify the import statement, as pandas also has read_excel(), read_json(), and others.


In [13]:
talks = pd.read_csv("talks.tsv", sep="\t", header=0)
talks


Out[13]:
Unnamed: 0 title type url_slug venue date location talk_url description
0 0 Don Juan in Love (and Lust) conference presentation don-juan-love-lust Messolonghi Byron Society's 10th Annual I... 2015-05-23 Messolonghi, GR https://www.messolonghibyronsociety.gr/index.p... NaN
1 1 The Writing Partners Program: A Case Study of ... conference panel writing-partners International Writing Centers Association Conf... 2015-10-09 Pittsburgh, PA https://academic.mattweirick.com/files/2015-10... In a 1990 Writing Center Journal piece, Muriel...
2 2 Committed to Write: Writing Centers, Libraries... conference presentation writing-centers-libraries-prisons International Writing Centers Association Conf... 2016-10-14 Denver, CO NaN NaN
3 3 A Trans Body of Books: (Trans)forming Library ... conference proceeding trans-collections Association of College & Research Libraries Co... 2017-03-23 Baltmore, MD http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/fil... This project attempts to quantify and understa...
4 4 Who Knows What's Good? Biopolitics, the S... conference panel biopolitics-health-info SILS Symposium on Information for Social Good 2017-04-21 Chapel Hill, NC http://info4socialgood.web.unc.edu/schedule/ Focusing on the intersections of health, medic...
5 5 Learning from the Library: Information Worlds ... conference presentation writing-centers-information-behavior International Writing Centers Association Conf... 2017-11-12 Chicago, IL NaN NaN
6 6 Toxic Librarianship: An Exploration of Waste a... conference panel toxic-librarianship SILS Symposium on Information for Social Good 2018-04-13 Chapel Hill, NC http://info4socialgood2018.web.unc.edu/panel-s... Libraries and communities nationwide are plagu...
7 7 "Not playing that game": An Explorat... poster project-fair SILS Project Fair 2018-04-13 Chapel Hill, NC https://academic.mattweirick.com/files/matthew... NaN

Escape special characters

YAML is very picky about how it takes a valid string, so we are replacing single and double quotes (and ampersands) with their HTML encoded equivilents. This makes them look not so readable in raw format, but they are parsed and rendered nicely.


In [14]:
html_escape_table = {
    "&": "&",
    '"': """,
    "'": "'"
    }

def html_escape(text):
    if type(text) is str:
        return "".join(html_escape_table.get(c,c) for c in text)
    else:
        return "False"

Creating the markdown files

This is where the heavy lifting is done. This loops through all the rows in the TSV dataframe, then starts to concatentate a big string (md) that contains the markdown for each type. It does the YAML metadata first, then does the description for the individual page.


In [15]:
loc_dict = {}

for row, item in talks.iterrows():
    
    md_filename = str(item.date) + "-" + item.url_slug + ".md"
    html_filename = str(item.date) + "-" + item.url_slug 
    year = item.date[:4]
    
    md = "---\ntitle: \""   + item.title + '"\n'
    md += "collection: talks" + "\n"
    
    if len(str(item.type)) > 3:
        md += 'type: "' + item.type + '"\n'
    else:
        md += 'type: "Talk"\n'
    
    md += "permalink: /talks/" + html_filename + "\n"
    
    if len(str(item.venue)) > 3:
        md += 'venue: "' + item.venue + '"\n'
        
    if len(str(item.location)) > 3:
        md += "date: " + str(item.date) + "\n"
    
    if len(str(item.location)) > 3:
        md += 'location: "' + str(item.location) + '"\n'
           
    md += "---\n"
    
    
    if len(str(item.talk_url)) > 3:
        md += "\n[More information here](" + item.talk_url + ")\n" 
        
    
    if len(str(item.description)) > 3:
        md += "\n" + html_escape(item.description) + "\n"
        
        
    md_filename = os.path.basename(md_filename)
    #print(md)
    
    with open("../_talks/" + md_filename, 'w') as f:
        f.write(md)

These files are in the talks directory, one directory below where we're working from.


In [16]:
!ls ../_talks


2012-03-01-talk-1.md
2013-03-01-tutorial-1.md
2014-02-01-talk-2.md
2014-03-01-talk-3.md
2015-05-23-don-juan-love-lust.md
2015-10-09-writing-partners.md
2016-10-14-writing-centers-libraries-prisons.md
2017-03-23-trans-collections.md
2017-04-21-biopolitics-health-info.md
2017-11-12-writing-centers-information-behavior.md
2018-04-13-project-fair.md
2018-04-13-toxic-librarianship.md

In [17]:
!cat ../_talks/2013-03-01-tutorial-1.md


---
title: "Tutorial 1 on Relevant Topic in Your Field"
collection: talks
type: "Tutorial"
permalink: /talks/2013-03-01-tutorial-1
venue: "UC-Berkeley Institute for Testing Science"
date: 2013-03-01
location: "Berkeley CA, USA"
---

[More information here](http://exampleurl.com)

This is a description of your tutorial, note the different field in type. This is a markdown files that can be all markdown-ified like any other post. Yay markdown!

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