Fall 2024 Reproducibility Workshop Series

The fifth iteration of our fall workshop series “Reproducibility and Data Science in R” wrapped up earlier this month, culminating for the first time ever in a Reproducibility Colloquium. We had a wonderful group of learners this year from a variety of departments and career stages. The workshop series is application-only as we try to keep the group small and committed to make sure everyone gets the most out of it.

In our 10 sessions together, we covered topics including project organization, reproducibility best practices, version control with git and GitHub, intermediate data wrangling, and how to archive code and data to make it citable. Check out the curriculum on the workshop website: https://cct-datascience.github.io/repro-data-sci/. One of the main changes to this year’s curriculum was the much earlier introduction of Quarto. Last year we introduced this scientific reporting software much later in the course and got a lot of feedback from learners that they wished they had it in their reproducibility tool belts earlier on.  We used Quarto as a way of taking notes, but encouraged learners to use it for reproducible reports or even to write manuscripts.

All of this culminated in our reproducibility colloquium where learners were invited to give short presentations on how they improved an aspect of their research with concepts they learned from the workshop series. We heard from Nastasia Baudin, a postdoc in the Chorover lab in Environmental Science; Margaret Mercer, a masters student in SNRE; and Dani Steinberg, also a masters student in SNRE.

We already have ideas for how to make the next edition of this workshop series even better! If you’re interested in applying, keep an eye out for announcements next spring when applications will open up again. Signing up for our group’s mailing list is a great way to access announcements: https://forms-a.trellis.arizona.edu/f/CampaignSubscription?tfa_4=7016R000001VAlU