Summary and Setup

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.

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.