Re: how do scientists use org mode?

["Christopher W. Ryan" <cryan@binghamton.edu>]

I'm fairly experienced with emacs, ESS, Sweave, and R, but I've only
started to dabble in Org mode in the past couple of weeks. Just as
Christoph is, I'm trying to decide whether/how Org-mode might be useful
in organizing and carrying out research projects, presentations, etc. So
this thread has been very useful and timely.

I'm trying to envision what a small research project, managed via a
single Org file, might look like. There would be notes from meetings,
thoughts from brainstorming sessions, scheduled appointments, data, R
code, R output, and manuscript/presentation prose. Some of this might be
destined for a manuscript, some for a beamer presentation, and some only
for "internal consumption." How are all these pieces differentiated in
the Org file, so that Org knows what to put in the
presentation/manuscript, and what not to? Could anyone share or point to
a short, perhaps fictional, example?

Thanks very much.

--Chris
Christopher W. Ryan, MD
SUNY Upstate Medical University Clinical Campus at Binghamton
425 Robinson Street, Binghamton, NY  13904
cryanatbinghamtondotedu

"Observation is a more powerful force than you could possibly reckon.
The invisible, the overlooked, and the unobserved are the most in danger
of reaching the end of the spectrum. They lose the last of their light.
From there, anything can happen . . ."  [God, in "Joan of Arcadia,"
episode entitled, "The Uncertainty Principle."]

Tomas Grigera wrote:
> Hi Cristoph
> 
> On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 15:27, John Hendy <jw.hendy@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 3:21 PM, GMX Christoph 13 <christoph-13@gmx.net> wrote:
>>> Hi
>>> this is my first post here and although I am evaluating org mode with great interest, I am also asking myself in which way other scientists are making use of org mode. It will take a while to get my head around how to accomplish certain things in org mode but for the moment I am intrigued by *why* one would want to approach the problem of organizing one's research with org mode and in which way.
>>
>> [...]
> 
> Thomas, Eric and John gave very useful answers, I just want to add my
> $0.02 as a physicist who recently (about a year ago) started using Org
> mode.  I started mainly looking for a workflow organization system,
> but slowly discovered it has many other possibilities. For research, I
> find org-babel is a great tool. It allows you to have a document
> collecting together thoughts and discussion along with data, data
> analysis, scripts for data manipulations and plots (Org tables are
> actually more like a spreadsheet since Org supports quite complex
> formulas and even plotting directly from the table).  The many export
> possibilities mean that you can share your notes with colleagues not
> using Org (or even Emacs).
> 
> I have also discovered it is a great tool for drafting presentations
> and then actually producing your slides via Latex- Beamer export.
> 
> HTH,
> 
> Tomas
>