MCQLL website

The website for the Montréal Computational & Quantitative Linguistics Lab, MCQLL, lives here. See mcqll.org.

This jekyll-based site was designed off of the al-folio theme, with modifications. If you wish to make a similar site, see readme there for some info (though note, I've switched from Pygments to Rouge for code highlighting).

Below is information you should find useful if you are editing the MCQLL site.

Getting started

Download this repo to your local machine. Have Ruby, jekyll and bundler installed. You might need to install ruby (for instance, on macOS, using brew install ruby, or using RVM, or chruby see below). After installing be sure to update your PATH by running echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/ruby/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile, and reload with source ~/.bash_profile.

Then,

bundler install

This should install the necessry 'gems' (specified in ./Gemfile), and if things are correctly configured, you should be able to run

bundle exec jekyll serve

to serve the site locally.

NOTES

• There may be issues with jekyll-scholar. Use RVM to install and use an earlier version of ruby, like rvm install 2.7.2 then rvm use 2.7.2. Check with ruby -v. If you are trying to build and getting issues with your ruby version, this may solve it.

Editing workflow ! IMPORTANT !

• edit a page locally (for example, edit one of the files in the _pages/ directory, or add a new lastname.firstname.md file to /_people to add a new lab member)
• generate the site locally with bundle exec jekyll serve (and preview your changes by visiting the URL that generates).
• once you are satisfied with your edits, add and commit your changes and then git push (note, this will not be published yet)
• you must deploy using ./bin/deploy --user, and respond y to proceed. This deploys the site to the master branch
  • What's going on here? It's a workaround. master is where the generated site will live, source is for the source code. When you just run git push you will update the source branch. But we want to just put a generated version of the site at the master branch, rather than have GitHub do this automatically. This is because GitHub pages doesn't allow reference to certain external plugins. Currently,github-scholar is such an unsupported plugin. So it won't work to just edit the site in the master branch and have GitHub do the generation for you.

News: Adding lab talks or other announcements

To add a new item to the News section, create a new document in the _news/ directory. For lab meetings, name this file with "meeting" followed by the date, like meeting-2020-04-22.md.

Follow this template:

---
layout: post
title: April 22nd - Presenter Name
date: 2020-04-21 # date of this post (use presentation date)
published: true  # can set to false for unpublished drafts 
inline: false 
---

At this week's lab meeting, **Presenter Name** will be presenting on *topic*.

- **{{ page.date | date: '%A, %B %-d' }}**, at **13:30** (Montréal time, UTC-4).

#### Abstract
<blockquote>
  Abstract here.
</blockquote>

#### Bio
Bio here. 

Note: allowing future-dated posts requires the line in the _config.yml:

future: true

if this is changed, posts about future lab meetings will not show up.

Adding/editing the list of members

Note: In addition to what is described below, there is an additional file _data/labmembers.yml, which has a list of current and previous lab members. Currently, this file is used only to make links to lab member pages from the bibliography. This means you have to add labmembers names and info in both places which is not ideal. TODO: Consolidate (all labmember metadata could be in labmembers.yml).

There is a markdown file for each lab member in the /_people directory, with name format lastname.firstname.md (this is just to be tidy and for alphabetic ordering when the site is built).

Add a headshot or two to the /assets/img/ directory. Then edit the markdown file: at the top of the file there is a short yaml header between two sets of three hyphens, which should be filled (starting with layout: person)

---
layout: person
name:        # Full Name Here
position:    # see "positions" description below
description: # Principal Investigator, or Associate, for faculty, or affiliation, for external collaborators
img:         # image.jpg (in the /assets/img/ directory)

profile:
  img: # image2.jpg (in /assets/img) optional, alternate image for the personal page, if desired
  office: # address, if you want this
  cv: # link to cv
  website: # link to external personal webpage
  link: 
    url:  # url for other link (such as google scholar profile or something)
    text: # text to show for this link.

---

Below this, enter the person's profile/bio as markdown/html.

Positions

The position attribute determines where (and whether) the person will appear on the People page.

Notes for specific positions:

• faculty: description should be the level, that is "Principal Investigator" or "Associate"
• postdoc:
• grad:
• undergrad:
• alum: will appear in a simple list. link to website, if there is a website listed under profile:website.
• assoc: this is for associated collaborators for whom we want a profile on the site. The description should be the external university (such as "Mila") for students being directly advised by one of the lab members.

Publications

The publications page is generated from .bib files located in the _/bibliography directory, using jekyll-scholar. Options for jekyll scholar are specified in the _config.yml (see jekyll-scholar readme for more info) Anything in the file default.bib will be included, plus anything in any additional files that are specified when the bibliography is built, as in publications.md, for instance, where {% bibliography --file tim.bib --file morgan.bib %} outputs the bibliography from default.bib plus tim.bib and morgan.bib.

Links are automatically generated for a dropdown abstract, or link to a PDF of a paper, depending on the presence of an abstract, or url tag in the bib entry, respectively. This is specified in _layouts/bib.html.

TODO: Currently there is an issue with urls that contain the tilde character (~). This is because jekyll-scholar uses a filter for bibtex that converts certain latex syntax (using bibtex-ruby) while reading the bib file, and the ~ character is replaced with a non-breaking space, which results in a broken link (~ becoming %C2%A0). This filter can be disabled, by manually setting the latex filter to not be used, in _config.yml like so

scholar:
  bibtex_filters:
    # - latex

However, this breaks a lot of other nice things, mostly making a lot of curly braces show up where we don't want them.

HACK: Currently there is just a hack solution: within the bib files in _/bibliography/*.bib, manually replace all occurences of the character ~ (in a URL) with the string \%7E (that is, the URL-encoding for the LaTex escape in HTML).

Putting links into bib files

By setting one of the following tags in a given bib file, links are generated in the following way, either to internal or external files:

• url/html/preprint/code = {http://somewhere.html} - a link to the URL http://somewhere.html (presumably site-external)
• pdf/poster/slides = {some.pdf} - a link to a file some.pdf in the /_assets/pdfs/ folder (site internal)
• abstract = {Some text} - a collapsing box with the text 'Some text' in it
• arxiv = {XXXX.YYYYY} - a link to http://arxiv.org/abs/XXXX.YYYYY
• lingbuzz = {somewhere.html} a link to https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/Something"

Example

For example, in the following, bib file,

@article{portelance.e:2017,
  Title = {Mildly context-sensitive grammar induction and variational {B}ayesian 
    inference},
  Author = {Portelance, Eva and Bruno, Chris and Bergen, Leon and O'Donnell,
    Timothy J.},
  Journal = {{arXiv}},
  Number = {arXiv:1710.11350 [cs.CL]},
  arxiv = {1710.11350},
  Year = {2017},
  abstract = {The following technical report presents a formal
    approach to probabilistic minimalist grammar parameter estimation. We 
    describe a formalization of a minimalist grammar. We then present an algorithm
    for the application of variational Bayesian inference to this
    formalization.}
}

the arxiv tag generates a link to the appropriate page on arxiv.org (https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.11350), and the abstract tag generates a collapsing html element with the text of the abstract in it.