Summary and Schedule
This lesson is targeted at a broad audience of researchers who want to learn how to be more efficient and effective in their data analysis and computing, whatever their career stage. Examples of our target audience are found in learner profiles.
The lesson is inspired by and based on the paper, Good Enough Practices in Scientific Computing (Wilson et al., 2017): “a set of good computing practices that every researcher can adopt, regardless of their current level of computational skill”.
These practices, which encompass data management, programming, collaborating with colleagues, organizing projects, tracking work, and writing manuscripts, are drawn from a wide variety of published sources, from the daily lives of contributors, and from work with volunteer organizations that have delivered workshops to thousands of researchers since 2010.
Prerequisites
There are no specific prerequisites. Learners should be participating or intending to participate in scientific research that involves computing. A basic knowledge of a coding language will help with the episode on Code.
Setup Instructions | Download files required for the lesson | |
Duration: 00h 00m | 1. Introduction | How can we use computers more effectively in a scientific project? |
Duration: 00h 15m | 2. Data Management |
What is data management? What data should I back up, and how? How can I share my data effectively? |
Duration: 00h 47m | 3. Code and Software |
What is research code and software? What can you do to make code usable and reusable? What are the characteristics of readable code? |
Duration: 01h 27m | 4. Collaboration |
What do collaborators need to know to contribute to my project? How can documentation make my project more efficient? What is a license and does my project need one? |
Duration: 02h 04m | 5. Project Organization |
How should I name my files? How does folder organization help me |
Duration: 02h 29m | 6. Keeping Track of Changes |
How do I make changes to a project without losing or breaking
things? Why does GitHub exist? |
Duration: 03h 09m | 7. Manuscripts | How do I write a collaborative paper? |
Duration: 03h 29m | 8. What To Do Next | How can you improve practices after this workshop? |
Duration: 03h 39m | 9. Agile | |
Duration: 04h 39m | Finish |
The actual schedule may vary slightly depending on the topics and exercises chosen by the instructor.
This lesson does not need any specific software installed beyond a web browser. It is mostly discussion-based, with examples of data organisation given and used for the discussion.