talks

Public, rendered slide decks for John M. Drake, served via GitHub Pages at https://jdrakephd.github.io/talks/.

Source .qmd files live in the private talks-src repo, or in a research repo when a talk belongs to one project (the UGA Law decks are in pandemic-planet/talks/). This repo holds only the rendered output; the source is never duplicated here.

Every deck is fully packaged

Each talk folder holds exactly two files:

<YYYY-MM-venue-topic>/
  index.html                  # the deck, as ONE self-contained file
  <venue-topic>.pdf           # Decktape export of the same deck

index.html must work when someone downloads it on its own and opens it offline. That means every figure, library, font and equation is embedded in the file, and nothing is loaded from a sibling folder or a CDN. Expect decks of 10–25 MB; GitHub warns above 50 MB and rejects files over 100 MB, so downsample oversized figures before rendering if a deck gets near that.

Quarto's embed-resources does most of this, but not all of it. It inlines images, reveal.js and theme CSS, yet it always loads the math library (KaTeX or MathJax) at runtime, so equations break offline. talks-src/embed-math.cjs fixes that by pre-rendering every equation with KaTeX, removing the runtime loader and inlining KaTeX's CSS and fonts.

Older talks predate this rule. 2026-08-esa-how-to-be-a-good-editor/ and 2026-09-uga-law-pandemic-planet/ still ship _files/ and figures/ alongside index.html, and 2026-07-esa-spatial-spread/ is a single file whose equations still load KaTeX from a CDN. Republish them with publish.sh to package them fully.

Publish with publish.sh (preferred)

From a clone of talks-src, with this repo cloned at ~/Desktop/Projects/talks:

./publish.sh 2026-10-columbia-anticipating-resurgence          # stage for review
./publish.sh 2026-10-columbia-anticipating-resurgence --push   # commit and push

It renders the deck self-contained, embeds the math, exports the PDF with Decktape, replaces the talk's folder here with index.html and the PDF, and adds the deck's listing.html to the landing page. See the talks-src README for details.

Publish a new talk by hand

1. In the source repo, render the deck as one self-contained file:

   quarto render slides.qmd -M embed-resources:true

   If the deck has equations, also run node embed-math.cjs slides.html <path-to-katex-dir> (from talks-src), with the deck set to html-math-method: {method: katex, url: "katex/"} and a local KaTeX copy in katex/.

2. Export the PDF with Decktape at the deck's slide size (Quarto's default is 1050×700):

   npx decktape reveal -s 1050x700 "file://$PWD/slides.html" venue-topic.pdf

3. Create the dated folder here and copy in just the two files:

   mkdir -p 2026-06-eds-age-agency-epidemics
   cp slides.html 2026-06-eds-age-agency-epidemics/index.html
   cp venue-topic.pdf 2026-06-eds-age-agency-epidemics/

4. Check the packaging: copy index.html alone into an empty folder, open it with networking off, and confirm the figures and equations render.

5. Add an entry at the top of the list in index.html (the landing page), commit and push:

   git add -A && git commit -m "Add EDS 2026 keynote" && git push

   The deck goes live at https://jdrakephd.github.io/talks/<slug>/.

Notes

• .nojekyll is required: it stops GitHub Pages from running Jekyll, which would otherwise drop files whose names begin with _.
• Speaker notes are embedded in the deck and are public. Keep reminders like [CHECK …] out of them; publish.sh refuses to run if any remain.
• To retire a talk, delete its folder and its line in index.html.