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Git

2 min read

Note

Git records the full history of a project, not just its current state.

Every change you make can be saved as a named checkpoint, with a description of what changed and why. You can review that history, restore earlier versions, and work on experimental changes without affecting the main version. This makes the development of a project visible and reversible in ways that saving files to a folder does not.

Git

One-sentence definition: Git is a distributed version control system that tracks changes to files over time, recording who changed what, when, and why.

Git operates through a few core ideas:

Commits are saved snapshots of your project at a point in time. Each commit includes the changes made, a short description, and a timestamp. Commits accumulate into a history you can browse or rewind.

Repositories are the containers that hold a project and its full history. A repository (repo) lives on your machine and can be synchronised with a remote copy — typically hosted on a platform like GitHub — so that the history is backed up and shareable.

Branches allow parallel lines of development. You can create a branch to work on something experimental without disturbing the main version, then merge it back when it is ready. This is how large collaborative projects avoid conflicts.

Staging is the step between making a change and committing it. You explicitly choose which changes to include in a commit, which encourages deliberate, well-described checkpoints rather than saving everything at once.

What it looks like in practice

For scholarly work, git means that every essay, note, or dataset has a complete revision history. You can see exactly what changed between drafts, recover deleted content, and share the development process — not just the final output. This is one mechanism behind the open scholarship principle that making the process visible is itself a form of scholarly contribution.

For collaborative work, git allows contributors to work independently and merge their contributions, with conflicts surfaced explicitly rather than silently overwritten.

Sources

Notes

Git is the underlying tool; GitHub, GitLab, and similar platforms are hosting services built on top of it. The distinction matters: git works entirely offline; the remote platform is optional infrastructure for sharing and backup.

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