Researchr: an academic workflow

[Stian Håklev]

I never got a chance to show this in plenary during EduCoder, but I did get a chance to show it to a few people who were interested. Basically, I've been playing with different ways both of optimizing my own research process as a graduate student, integrating a number of apps, and also of enabling me to share all this with others (inspired by other people who have experimented with "PhD wikis"). 

It's a pretty duct-tapey thing, not easy to install at all (I wish this wasn't the case), and although almost all the apps involved are open source, it only works on Mac right now (because the apps are all Mac apps). If anyone want to install it, and are fairly technical (can install Ruby libraries etc), all the source is on GitHub, and I'd be happy to help. But rather than thinking that this is the "ultimate" tool which everyone should use, I see it more as an exploration of the kinds of things that should be possible... also very inspired by the kind of intimate and highly sophisticated ways in which programmers collaborate using for example GitHub, and are not afraid to make unfinished projects available in all their glory.

Have a look at this screencast first http://vimeo.com/25295002 - and then have a look at more information about it here: http://reganmian.net/wiki/researchr:start (note that some of the technical information is out of date, let me know if you are interested). You can also browse the wiki to see an example of researchr in use. 

I love the system and use it extensively. I am not sure how to "push this further" - whether to try to make the tool I've made more usable and installable (likely not realistic without support from more programmers), whether there would be a paper about the design of the tool, the phenomenon of PhD wikis etc. And of course the discussion about a Science 2 network at the recent EduCoder was very exciting to me, and I'd love for us to brainstorm ways in which we could share ideas, bibliographies, etc.

(I also have a bunch of ideas about how the entire publishing infrastructure could be more streamlined, with semantic metadata embedded in PDFs, better formats than PDFs, how Open Access journals and institutional repositories could begin moving in this direction, etc)

Take care,
Stian

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http://reganmian.net/blog -- Random Stuff that Matters

[Cresencia Fong]

I just want to add that Stian was kind enough to get his beautiful Researchr system working on my laptop.  i'm looking forward to crawling into a deep hole (as of tomorrow), starting my comps reading, and using Researchr to power my workflow - yeeaaaah baby!

cresencia

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[Armin Krauss]

Hi Stian,

right now my time doen't allow me to look at this system and think how to simplify it.

However, I am interested in this system and would love to see it be used by more researchers

in order to bring more openness to the academic process.

Maybe we can talk after EvoRoom and PlaceWeb are well on their way.

Armin

[Baba Kofi Weusijana]

Are there a set of similar open/free tools that can solve the same
problems across the Windows/Mac/Unix platforms?

Dr. Baba Kofi Weusijana
http://www.linkedin.com/in/babakofi

[gbby]

I've been working on a few things. Will try to post some notes and consolidate things next week when I'm back in Toronto.