If you've ever been working on a manuscript, statistical analysis, or notes on your reading, you might have started saving versions of your work with names like "Manuscript_good_3_a", "Manuscript_after_edits_good", "Manuscript_Use_This", and "Manuscript_Use_This_Final". Not only for your advisor or collaborators, but also for yourself a few months in the future, this approach to managing versions of your work can be confusing at best and misleading at worst, causing you to forget which version is the most up-to-date and, as a result, to re-do or lose work.
"Version control" is a type of free software that you can use to manage your work -- not only to remember which versions are from when, but also to see exactly what you changed between versions, and why. Like a time machine, version control software lets you move back and forth between versions without clogging your hard drive with multiple copies of the same files.
We will be discussing the "why" and "how" of using Git, a popular and free version control system that is also the foundation for GitHub, which software developers and academics alike are using to share and collaborate on their work. We will also introduce several tools that are enabled by this approach to managing projects, in which notes and analyses can be re-accessed and re-used more easily for new tasks.
This talk will center on a program called SmartGit (http://www.syntevo.com/smartgit/; free for noncommercial use), which provides a simple point-and-click interface to Git. It will also use the command-line (the Terminal app in Mac OSX and Linux, and Command Prompt or Cygwin (https://www.cygwin.com/) in Windows -- no experience assumed).