We had our third Data Conversation here at Lancaster University again with the aim of bringing together researchers to share their data stories and discuss issues and exchange ideas in a friendly and informal setting.
We had a bit of a change this time, however, as we had a special guest speaker, Neil Chue-Hong of the Software Sustainability Institute talking about Software as “a different kind of research object“.
We all had plenty of time to eat pizza and crisps before Neil invited us all to consider reproducibility and sustainability in relation to software. Neil has a very clear and engaging style which really helped us, the audience, navigate around the complex issues of managing software. He asked us all to imagine returning to our work in three months time – would it make sense? Would it still work? He also addressed some of the complex issues around versioning, authorship and sharing software.
The second half of the afternoon followed the more traditional Data Conversations route of short lightning talks given by Lancaster University researchers.
First up was Barry Rowlingson (Lancaster Medical School) talking about the benefits of using GitLab for developing, sharing and keeping software safe.
Barry Rowlingson weighs up the benefits of GitLab over GitHub…
Next was Kristoffer Geyer (Psychology) talking about the innovative and challenging uses of smartphone data for investigating behaviour and in particular the issues of capturing the data from external and ever changing software. Kris mentioned how the recent update of Android (to Oreo) makes retrieving relevant data more difficult – a flexible approach is definitely what is needed.
Then we heard from Andrew Moore (School of Computing and Communications) who returned to the theme of sharing software, looking at some of the barriers and opportunities which present themselves. Andrew argued passionately that we need more resources for software sharing (such as specialist Research Software Engineers) but also that researchers need to share their attitudes towards sharing their code.
Our final speaker was the Library’s own Stephen Robinson (Library Developer) talking about using containers as a method of software preservation. This provoked quite some debate – which is exactly what we want to encourage at these events!
We think these kind of conversations are a great way of getting people to share good ideas and good practice around data management and we look forward to the next Data Conversations in January 2018!
This blog post was co-authored by Rachel MacGregor and Hardy Schwamm.
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