Journal Entry Number 01 - jbrendecke/R4R_Notebook GitHub Wiki

Entry Number 1 for 09/14/2022

The past few weeks have been the start of the Root for Resilenacne cohort. Getting a more formal training on Data Science has so far been really interesting, especially seeing how it varies among people in different fields. So far in my work, data science has always been referred to as this sort of broad and loosely defining subject but never really discussed more. Furthermore, most tools used in data science are not formally taught in any of my department's classes. As a result, there are a lot of tools/software that I did not know existed or are not aware of their full capabilities. Hopefully being in this cohort will give me a lot of exposure to this field and will allow me to pass this knowledge to other people in my department.

One of the things we introduced on over the past few weeks was GitHub. GitHub has been a site that I'm aware of but I have never used in my research. My research so far has been working with one or two other individuals so typically if we need to share a code, we'll just send it over email. However, after seeing the initial capabilities of GitHub, I can definitely see this being very helpful too in the future. I know as I network with more scientists in my field and projects become more complex, sharing code and being able to track changes will prove extremely useful.

We also spent a few lectures discussing open and fair science with the idea that your work/data should be made available to other scientists. Fair (F: Findable; A: Accessible, I: Interoperable, R: Reusable) science incorporates open science but can be restricted when needed. These lectures made me reflect on my current work and publications. All the data I worked with so far has been available to anyone on government facility websites, however, until our lectures I assumed just mentioning where we got our data from was good enough to satisfy open science principles. After our lecture, however, I was a bit surprised by how much further I need to go for my work to be considered open science. It will be something I keep in mind for future research and discussions with my research advisor.