Forget the dissertation. Nobody really reads those (really, not even my committee).

What we want to watch in real-time is the defense. Especially the spanking tunnel at the end.

I was expecting to see the ten-year process involving teaching assistantship, employment, marriage, and children, all illumninated by the light of a candle at 2 am in a basement office next to the crib.

Whilst not as slick as the JS version, I did much the same thing with mine: https://vimeo.com/76969179 when bored one day. I couldn't find any tools to create exactly what I wanted, so knocked up https://gist.github.com/archgrove/6766129, https://github.com/archgrove/PDFProofSheet, and a bunch of shell scripts to generate a folder of images. Fed this lot into iMovie, and voila.

That's really neat! I'm not sure if this is intentional because your work is private, but I would love it if I could click on the images or SHAs to go actually see the thing.

Related, I loved watching pg writing an essay live : https://code.stypi.com/hacks/13sentences

I wrote something similar while I was writing my diploma thesis, albeit not that visual. For me it was handy to see whether I was making any progress, so I regularly updated a CSV file with the current number of pages, lines, words, figures, code lines, and code comments. The idea was that on every day I did something I could at least look at the data and see how much (also the script automatically adjusted page, line and word count for the appendix which I didn't want to count).

Excellent! People writing important papers really should be using Git. When documents are extremely complex, previously removed portions can have pertinence later.

This is really cool stuff. Reminds me of a stripped down version of notch's live coding sessions for Ludum Dare.

Any reason you chose LaTeX as your content dev language and publishing over something a little "easier" like DocBook XML and Publican (which uses LaTeX as an intermediate build language to create PDFs)? Is it required, what you're used to, or purity of notation?

Why am I obsessing over the arrow not quite lining up on the points of time? Until the fourth tick, then following some pattern..

While you mention that you are hesitant to release the content of the dissertation prematurely, could you instead release the build tools you used to make your "flatplans"?

It would be a huge help to those of us about to write our dissertations :-)

You could do it in Authorea (Git+LaTeX) and actually show us what you are writing too!

That's an excellent solution for big problem in my country (not at PhD level though) namely plagiarism. Make students to use such system, turn autocommit on and you can see their progress and all deviations (big chunks of text appearing from nowhere etc.).