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4 Introduction to course
4.1 The Big Picture
You’ve read the syllabus and already know an overall idea of why we are teaching this course. But we’d like to take another chance to emphasize the big picture context of this course and its material.
We are in a special time in research. We are facing several large scale technological and societal changes:
- We researchers are experiencing higher demands from funding agencies, universities, and peers for transparency and rigor in our research.
- Our work is getting more and more complex, which requires higher degrees of (potentially highly distributed and virtual) team-based science.
- There is a higher public attention on research, with mass participation and attention through the Internet and social media.
- Our access to powerful computing resources and massive datasets is leading to an increasing rise in more complex analytics and data processing, such as through machine learning and AI.
- Increasingly your research output is someone else’s research input, such as with meta-research1 or meta-analysis.
1 Evidence-based evaluation and development of research methods.
In this course, our ultimate aim is to start creating data analysis projects that are: self-contained (within a single folder); have a record of changes made to the files; make it easier for others to collaborate; make it simpler to connect the project with a scientific output like a paper; and, to structure analyses to be more reproducible (or at least more easily inspectable).
4.2 Common questions
4.4 Small reminder
We always get feedback that for some it is too fast and for others it is too slow. Ideally, everyone would say it was the perfect speed. But that won’t likely happen. So instead, we aim as much as possible to have fewer people say it was too fast than there are people saying it was too slow. This is an introduction course, so we’re trying to assume as little to no knowledge on many of these concepts. So, for those with some knowledge, it will feel slow at times! You can always help your neighbour out!