The Turing Way Newsletter: 17 June 2020
Join Collaboration Café today, bring Data Feminism perspectives to The Turing Way and learn how we can promote an equitable culture in our community!
Hello Turing Way friends!
The core team of The Turing Way advocates for open and equitable research culture and is committed to supporting efforts against systemic inequality in the science and community at large. To support the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement, we urge our community members to understand the wider context, join calls for action and help each other learn ways to collectively stand in solidarity.
Join this week’s Collaboration Cafe today at 19:00 BST (your local time) and subscribe to the community calendar for the future events.
We have recently updated the format of our online book to facilitate easy navigation of its chapters on research reproducibility and provide dedicated locations for new guides for project design, communication, collaboration and ethical research. If you would like to report any bug or error, or suggest useful ideas for improving accessibility, please comment under the issue #1220.
If you have been reading the Data Feminism book by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, join our effort to capture your perspective and lessons learned in The Turing Way’s guide for Ethical Research (issue #1205).
Stay safe!
Read more details on these topics below 👇
The Black Lives Matter movement and its ongoing protests demand us to have informed and sensitive discussions on history, race, science and society to take necessary actions as individuals against systemic injustice. We believe that we can support this movement authentically only when we educate ourselves on these issues more widely. Therefore, we are highlighting this list of curated resources by lectureinprogress.com that covers a range of topics from history, philosophy, race, allyship, mentoring and training. We urge you to learn from and share relevant educational resources (like books, videos, and podcasts, calls for actions, and organisations to support), recognise our privilege (and lack thereof) and use our platforms to raise voice against systemic inequality.
Tweet by The Turing Way in support of Black Lives Matter Movement
We have a Collaboration Café today at 19:00 BST (your local time). You can sign up on this HackMD to indicate your participation: https://hackmd.io/@KirstieJane/CollabCafe.
In this coworking call, we would love to onboard new members who have recently joined the community and would like to know where they can get involved. We would also like to discuss how we can continue hosting these calls in the future to accommodate the need from the community and the team members.
During the lockdown, while many of us are working from home, we have also been hosting 1-hour short coworking calls. Unlike the Collaboration Café, these calls take place almost every day during the week and offer a space to work on ideas for The Turing Way and seek support from the core members of the The Turing Way. You can sign up every week to indicate your participation in this HackMD: https://hackmd.io/@malvikasharan/TW-coworking.
To get notified with the dates for the upcoming community events, click on this link to subscribe to The Turing Way community calendar.
We overhauled The Turing Way book to make it easy to browse, read and contribute to. You will now find the dedicated locations for guides for Reproducible Research, Project Design, Communication, Collaboration and Ethical Research. You will also be able to read and write chapters useful for maintaining and supporting our community in the community handbook. You can visit the online book at https://the-turing-way.netlify.app/.
Followed by a recent upgrade of Jupyter Book, we have been able to bring about the recent changes while simplifying the backend infrastructure that hosts the book on Netlify. Consequently, our style guide have also been updated to include ways to cite and cross-refer chapters within the book. Thanks to the numerous community members for their support that has helped us achieve this major milestone in the project. If you notice any error or bug that might have been introduced due to this update, please report them under the issue #1220.
Tweet by The Turing Way with the screenshot of the welcome page of the online book
Data Feminism explores current practices within data science and asks us to recognise and act on the role that power plays throughout research processes, from data collection and storage to communication and visualisation. On 4 June, The Alan Turing Institute hosted a webinar with the authors of Data Feminism, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, which was attended by around 700 attendees. Through seminars like this, their weekly reading group and community engagements over the last months, the authors have not only shed light on imbalanced power structures underlying data science but have started active and timely discussions around research ethics.
Inspired by their work, we want to welcome and support interested participants, readers, and users of Data Feminism to contribute to The Turing Way. Specifically, we invite contributions to build new chapters with recommendations, best practices, case studies, and impact stories inspired and shaped by Data Feminism in The Turing Way's Guide to Ethical Research. You can join the discussion but comment on the Github Issue #1205.
Our community member Patricia Herterich subtweeting Camila Rangel Smith’s tweet from the Data Feminism Reading Group where The Turing Way got a shout out for our call for contribution
Open Life Science program mentors and trains individuals and stakeholders working in research organisations who want to promote Open Science practice in their communities. After successfully concluding their first cohort, they have announced the call for application, deadline for which is 30 June 2020 The application can be submitted via https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ols2.
Under the Turing’s Tools, Practices and Systems Research Program, Open Life Science has collaborated with The Turing Way to offer training and mentoring to interested members from the community. You can reach out to Malvika Sharan (msharan@turing.ac.uk) for advice to write your proposal to join this program individually or in team. More information regarding the roles and benefits for the mentees and eligibility of a proposed project can be found on their website.
Open Life Science promotional flyer for their second cohort
Heidi Siebold is a medical AI researcher, research software engineer and open science expert at LMU Munich, Bielefeld University and the Helmholtz Zentrum Munich. She develops machine learning methods to figure out which patients react well to certain treatments and implements these methods in R. Her passion for open and reproducible research has led her to join the Turing Way community. She co-authored two chapters Research Compendia and File Naming Convention in The Turing Way during and after her participation at the Book Dash in February 2020. Ever since, she has been engaging with other community members through reviewing and editing new contributions, and participating in community discussions through GitHub. In her words:
I am involved in meta-research projects (research about research). I spend most of my time identifying ways to improve the way we do research while supporting, teaching and contributing to open projects such as The Turing Way. In the long term, I would like to create an online course on reproducible data science with The Turing Way as a basis.
Tim Head from the BinderHub project has written a tutorial called Zero to Binder to help learners get started with using BinderHub (the software behind mybinder.org). This tutorial provides a step-by-step guide with examples from Python scripts. Recently, our core community member Sarah Gibson has co-written versions of this tutorial with Anna Krystalli called From Zero to Binder in R!, and with Oliver Strickson and Alex Bird called Zero to Binder in Julia! to support new learners who are more comfortable with using R and Julia respectively.
We are delighted to recommend this new preprint by community member Barbara Vreede and her colleagues:
Van Lissa, C. J., Brandmaier, A. M., Brinkman, L., Lamprecht, A., Peikert, A., Struiksma, M., & Vreede, B. (2020, May 31). WORCS: A Workflow for Open Reproducible Code in Science. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/k4wde
From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, computational communities have been asynchronously organising hackathons, data modelling projects, task forces, and working groups. Even though this is a unique chance to establish new collaborations and start a meaningful project, it is equally important to ensure that the teams and communities around these projects are built on the foundation of excellent science and community practices. Here is a post on 10 community practices that can help build an effective online team or community, especially to ensure that a positive culture of collaboration is fostered. This blog was posted on The Software Sustainability Institute, and co-authored by Malvika Sharan, Yo Yehudi, Colin Sauze, Raniere Silva, Robert Haines and Claire Wyatt, under the mini-blog series.
If you are preparing to go back to your office after working remotely for the last 3 months, give this post a read: 3 lessons from remote meetings we’re taking back to the office. This blog was posted by opensource.com and authored by project leads of Mozilla Open Leaders, Abigail Cabunoc Mayes and Chad Sansing, and the OpenScapes community lead Julia Stewart Lowndes. They describe how using a welcoming tone, developing robust documentations and choosing right tools that we have been using while working from home can make real-life meetings better and more inclusive when we get back to the office.
CogX 2020 Global Leadership Summit and Festival of AI & Emerging Technology took place from 8 to 10 June 2020 online. Among several international speakers were several members from The Alan Turing Institute who presented their research work at specialised sessions or virtual stages. Kirstie Whitaker, project lead of The Turing Way and head of the Tools, Practices & Systems (TPS) research programme hosted a stage for open source practices and research with following talks: "Sharing Reproducible Analyses with Binder at Scale" by Sarah Gibson, “Research to empower: Co-creating a citizen science platform” by Georgia Aitkenhead, “The Turing Way: Building a culture of collaboration in Data Science” by Malvika Sharan and “Julia and MLJ: Adopting new technology for AI/ML” by Sebastian Vollmer and Gwyn Jones. You can catch up on this session by reading this twitter thread by Kirstie, or watching this session online on YouTube.
Tweet by The Alan Turing Institute about the TPS stage at CogX 2020
On 11 June 2020, The Turing Way team members Kirstie Whitaker, Sarah Gibson and Malvika Sharan delivered a Binder workshop for research reproducibility in collaboration with UKDRI. Attended by 25 participants, this half-day workshop introduced attendees to The Turing Way project and discussed the importance of reproducibility when sharing codes online. The second part of the workshop was a hands-on session for using Binderhub on a test GitHub repository, which was followed by a group exercise to work on real case examples from their own research.
We thank the UKDRI members, I-Chun Lin and Emilia Danielewska for hosting this workshop and taking care of all the tasks that went into organising this event online.
Tweet by Kirstie Whitaker with a picture of our online course participants on Zoom
Esther Plomp, Lena Karvovskaya, and Yasemin Turkyilmaz wrote a blog post titled Movement-building from home, a participant view describing their lessons learned from attending the Mozilla Foundation’s Movement-building from home. In these online calls, they learned about online meetings, community care, personal ecology and community management. They complemented their comprehensive notes with the illustrations developed by The Turing Way and Scriberia.
The Reproducible, Interpretable, Open, & Transparent Science (also called Riots Science club) hosted an event on Leadership & research integrity where Nadia Soliman talked about leadership and leadership development from the Army.
Tweet by RIOTS Science club with Nadia’s slide with The Turing Way and Scriberia illustrations.
1. Tweet by Sarah Gibson about her interview on Research Software Hour where she talked about life as a Research Software Engineer, and a core contributor of the Binder and The Turing Way projects.
2. Tweet by Wiebke Toussaint expressing the joy of contributing to an Open Source project and getting the first Pull Request merged in The Turing Way.
3. Tweet by Fiona Grimm from the Binder workshop with The Turing Way team.
4. Tweet by Kate Simpsons inviting case studies from Data Feminism to The Turing Way.
5. Tweet by Christine Foster in the context of this post on creating reproducible code and research pipeline.
6. Tweet from The Alan Turing Institute from the CogX 2020 talk on The Turing Way with illustrations developed by The Turing Way and Scriberia.
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You are welcome to contribute content for the next newsletter by emailing Malvika Sharan.
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