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I am looking for academic research about Emacs. Any disciplines are interesting; psychology, economics, design, computer science including subdisciplines such as HCI and software engineering, philosophy, anthropology, science and technology studies, political economy, theology, culinary sciences..., history, comparative literature, cultural studies, math; everything and anything is interesting.

The ones I found with a quick search were these two:

Twidale, Michael B.; Jones, M. Cameron. 2005. "Let them use emacs": the interaction of simplicity and appropriation, in International reports on socio-informatics 2(2) 66-71. Retrieved from https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/9607

Palmer, J.; Duffy, T.; Gomoll, K.; Gomoll, T; Richards-Palmquist, J. and Trumble, J. A. 1988. "The design and evaluation of online help for Unix EMACS: capturing the user in menu design," in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 44-51, March 1988. doi: 10.1109/47.6920. Retrieved from https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6920/references

Tyler
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Mace Ojala
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  • Welcome to Emacs.SE! This question is too open-ended for our format. I suggest you try posting it on Reddit instead. – Dan Oct 18 '19 at 19:58
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    I think that if the question asks for specific research references then it is specific enough. It's not like it's fishing for opinions. I'll vote to reopen. I can understand closing as too broad, though. But generally a question is too broad if the answers are likely to be all over the map, at all levels of detail, and not necessarily helpful. I think this question and its answers could be helpful to the community. – Drew Oct 18 '19 at 21:51
  • @Drew: that's fine if people want to vote to reopen. I closed it on the basis of the following rule of thumb: what would an acceptable answer look like, and how would one choose between competing answers? We could end up with a bunch of different answers, each citing a different publication, and none of which would be more or less right/acceptable than the others. I think we decided a long while back not to do "big list" questions, and this strikes me as one of those. – Dan Oct 19 '19 at 00:19
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    Alternatively, an initial answer could be provided by the Community and people could add references to that. Once in a while, an editor could go in and rerarrange/classify/curate the entries to keep the list useful. If somebody adds another answer with a few references, they could be asked to add it to the main answer instead. Just a suggestion. – NickD Oct 19 '19 at 00:33
  • @NickD: that's also fine if people vote to reopen. – Dan Oct 19 '19 at 01:32
  • There's some discussion [on reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/djrlib/academic_research_about_emacs/), where this question was also posted. – zck Oct 19 '19 at 03:17
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    Having a community answer with a list sounds like a good way around the problem pointed out by Dan. – Stefan Oct 19 '19 at 03:40
  • What @NickD suggested (and Stefan seconded) about a community answer sounds good to me. I didn't think of the "problem" of accepting one of a set of answers. When I added my comment I was thinking only that the question and some answers might help users. – Drew Oct 19 '19 at 05:29
  • @zck: Yes, I added Reddit link there to this existing emacs.SE question (by the same OP). SE adheres more to a Q&A style, discouraging discussion. The two can be differently useful and are sometimes found differently by search engines. – Drew Oct 19 '19 at 05:33
  • I agree with the community answer thing. – JeanPierre Oct 19 '19 at 09:46
  • Thanks everyone, and I actually agree with @dan that the formulation of this question does not have a _definition of done_, ie. something that would allow the question to be answered. Thanks for pointing it out, and _/r/emacs_ is where I originally envisioned to raise the question, and there are some replies there. But I posted the question here too, to cast a wider net. My plan was to, after a bit of sourcing, to collect them on a page on EmacsWiki, and maybe a Zotero group (Zotero is a thing for managing academic references). – Mace Ojala Oct 19 '19 at 09:47
  • Checkout the full [org page about papers](https://orgmode.org/worg/org-papers.html). Emacs is currently the only tool fully supporting Orgmode. – Tobias Oct 19 '19 at 14:22
  • @Drew I think a `community answer thing´ should be written by Drew as more or less the top man here at Emacs.SE and it should start with that article: [RMS: EMACS the extensible, customizable self-documenting display editor](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=806466). – Tobias Oct 19 '19 at 14:32
  • @Tobias: ;-) Sorry to disappoint, but I would likely never get around to doing that. And FWIW, besides the community answer approach (which requires maintenance etc.), I'm also OK with either (1) closing the question as too broad or (2) leaving it open and now worrying about trying to get to "THE" answer - OP just never bothers to accept any of the individual answers. Is it really so important to always have an "accepted" answer? – Drew Oct 19 '19 at 16:36
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    I have converted this question to a Community Wiki. @MaceOjala: Please feel free to move the citations you have in your question to an answer post. – Dan Oct 19 '19 at 16:39
  • @Dan Thank you very much. I think that is the best solution. Up to now I didn't know what a [Community Wiki](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-community-wiki-posts) is. – Tobias Oct 19 '19 at 16:44
  • @MaceOjala Yes, you should definitively write the answer because otherwise [you would need 100 reputation (as I understand the linked post)](https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/11741/232422) to add references to it. – Tobias Oct 19 '19 at 16:53
  • Thanks everyone, I appreciate the deliberations. I made the EmacsWiki pages about the topic already, rather than a bit later as I planned, and collected references there. That is a bit of a diversion away from StackExchange by rather setting up an EmacsWiki wiki page rather than an SE one. I wonder what your thoughts about that might be? – Mace Ojala Oct 19 '19 at 17:43

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Answering myself :) There is a new page (which I just set up today) on EmacsWiki called Research About Emacs, and also a Zotero group called Emacs for all your reference convenience.

The former1 is, hopefully and potentially a growing, maintainable, close-to-Emacs-community and also search engine friendly page for documenting, disseminating, organizing and debating research about and around Emacs. The latter2 is hopefully a growing, maintainable and also close-to-academic-community place for collecting Emacs references now and in the future.

This answers the question. Have a nice day, self, and enjoy the readings collected so far. So far they are

Aspinall, D. (2000). Proof General: A Generic Tool for Proof Development. In S. Graf & M. Schwartzbach (Eds.), Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (pp. 38–43). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Crestani, M. (2005). A New Garbage Collectorfor XEmacs (Masters thesis, University of Tübingen). Retrieved from https://crestani.de/xemacs/pdf/thesis-newgc.pdf

Lapalme, G. (1998). Dynamic tabbing for automatic indentation with the layout rule. Journal of Functional Programming, 8(5), 493–502. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796898003098

Monnier, S., & Sperber, M. (2018, September). Evolution of Emacs Lisp. 36.

Neubauer, M., & Sperber, M. (2001). Down with Emacs Lisp: Dynamic Scope Analysis. Proceedings of the Sixth ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming, 38–49. https://doi.org/10.1145/507635.507642

Palmer, J., Duffy, T., Gomoll, K., Gomoll, T., Richards-Palmquist, J., & Trumble, J. A. (1988). The design and evaluation of online help for Unix EMACS: Capturing the user in menu design. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 31(1), 44–51. https://doi.org/10.1109/47.6920

Stallman, R. M. (1981). EMACS the Extensible, Customizable Self-documenting Display Editor. Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN SIGOA Symposium on Text Manipulation, 147–156. https://doi.org/10.1145/800209.806466. Available online at https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html

Twidale, M. B., & Jones, M. C. (2005). “Let them use emacs”: The interaction of simplicity and appropriation. International Reports on Socio-Informatics, 2, 66–71. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2142/9607

Voit, K. (2013). What really happened on September 15th 2008? Getting The Most from Your Personal Information with Memacs. ArXiv:1304.1332 [Cs]. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.1332

Zhong, S., & Xu, H. (2019). Intelligently Recommending Key Bindings on Physical Keyboards with Demonstrations in Emacs. Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 12–17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3301275.3302272

Mace Ojala
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  • I don't know if papers about [versor-mode](http://emacs-versor.sourceforge.net/) exists, but it's probably worth mentioning as it was part of an research project about text editing. – clemera Oct 21 '19 at 13:12