Timelapse Writing of a Research Paper

I saved several versions while writing a paper submitted to the computer science conference, "World Wide Web." This resulted in 463 intermediate versions of the paper. I stitched all of the versions together into a video. This is the result.

• Category

  Education

[Jason High]

Did you use any bibliographic software (e.g. EndNote, RefWorks)? If so, what did you use?

Neat-o, by the way!

[Tim Weninger]

I use LaTeX for the typesetting, which has bibtex built into/around it. But bibtex is merely a description format. I use Mendeley to keep track of my citations.

[dotinfo]

Did the authorship change twice?

[Tim Weninger]

No. The author was always me and my adviser. An undergraduate student had been helping; and we decided he did enough to warrant coauthorship. We went back and forth between his American nick-name and the Englishification of his actual Chinese name. That's why the author-line changed a few times.

[Philipp Singer]

What happened to the 11th page?

[Tim Weninger]

The page limit is 10 pages, so I just rendered the first 10 pages.

[Tim Weninger]

I didn't actually "record" anything. I wrote a computer program that converted the pdf files into images with the page layout, and then used another program called ffmpeg to stitch the pages together at 10 frames per second.

[Ted Benson]

Also -- this is awesome! Can you release the code on Github to merge the PDFs into a movie?

[charleybucketcdp]

if that's for college, I'm fucked!

[NinjaMonkey68]

lol DCleroy!

[DCleroy]

Ain't nobody got time fo dat

[rockskaterdudeperson]

I should probably write my research paper now...

[XxMarkTheSharkxX]

Lol ive done twice as much in one night wooo procrastinaters.... Jk i havent haha

[Patrick Gresham]

Ill give you $50 to write mine!

[Scribanerds]

DicelingXXpro if you are doing this in 7th grade it's gonna be a 5 page paper because I did a 5 page research paper in 7 th grade

[MrEdman4]

How did you type with such small font?