accecare: Remove identifying information from manuscripts

ac•ce•ca•re /ˌatʃːekˈaːre/ verb (Italian)  1 "to make blind"

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accecare is a simple helper script that essentially takes a list of words and phrases and changes them to something else.

It's designed to be used with Pandoc to replace identifying information in an academic manuscript with anonymized (or blinded) details. Instead of manually searching and replacing your document before compiling a blinded document (and then undoing all the blinding to compile a non-blinded document), this script takes care of anonymization for you.

Usage

1. Create a CSV file with two columns named original and replacement. See replacements.csv for an example.
2. Make accecare.py executable with chmod a+x accecare.py
3. Run accecare.py on a Markdown file and pipe the output to pandoc
4. That's it!

Example

Ordinarily, you can compile example.md as an HTML file with identifying information included like so:

pandoc example.md -s --template templates/author_info.html5 -o output/example.html

This creates a lovely manuscript.

To create a blinded manuscript, you can either edit example.md by hand and remove all identifying information (boo), or pipe the output of accecare.py through to pandoc (yay):

./accecare.py replacements.csv example.md | pandoc -s --template templates/author_info.html5 -o output/example_blinded.html

This creates a lovely anonymized manuscript.

Attenzione!

This is a super simple and overly crude method for blinding manuscripts. With the example replacements.csv, for instance, every occurrence of NASA would be replaced, even if it's just mentioned in the text.