HEIDI's NEWSLETTER

More and more funders are recognizing the vital role of software in research. How can you leverage your software skills to aquire funding? In this post I want to share: Recent developments on the status of software in research and funding. Stay tuned also for an upcoming post on: Case studies and practical strategies for securing funding. Did I miss anything in this post? I will use this information in future courses and any other info would be appreciated. Send missing info This will be one...

New frameworks for course websites are popping up all the time. In this post, I'll review some of them. Today I want to talk about three interesting frameworks for building course websites: Quarto, the Carpentries Workbench, and Nebula. All of them rely on the use of Markdown and are thus easy to version control, reproducible, and reusable. They’re all pretty handy when teaching software skills, as they allow incorporating code in a straight-forward way. Quarto Websites / Books Website Docs /...

Taking notes and drawing little images helps me think, but they are also helpful to others. Would sketchnoting also be for you? I started sketchnoting by taking notes about scientific presentations and meetings. They help me think and keep me focused on what is said. If used to find it very hard to concentrate during presentations and I found a couple of ways to focus on what is said and trying to really understand it. One of them is making myself come up with questions about the talk (a...

Too many code projects in research are done by a single person. Keep reading on why that's bad and how to do better. It’s been a while since my last post. Founding the Digital Research Academy, holidays and LOTS AND LOTS of workshops and events have taken all my time. But it’s time to start writing again. One of the workshops I taught since my last post was on collaborative coding at the wonderful RSE summer school at KIT (click through the timetable to find all kinds of cool materials)....

I am excited to share that the Digital Research Academy incorporation is almost done. We had our notary appointment last week, set up the bank account and are now waiting for the official registration of the DRA Digital Research Academy GmbH. I published my first post about the initial idea for the Digital Research Academy in May 2023. Now, just a year and a few months later, the Digital Research Academy is becoming not only an initiative but a company. Last week Joyce Kao, Melanie Imming and...

I am in the process of making my newsletter FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). Here's how. I am an advocate for Open Science. The FAIR priciples are very near and dear to my heart. I was excited when the Open Science folks at Jülich archived a bunch of my posts and gave them a persistent identifier (DOI, see archived posts here). This was exactly what I was still missing to make my posts more FAIR. However, I cannot expect them to take care of archiving all my posts and...

I get asked for career advice all the time (even though I am just figuring stuff out myself). Generally I try to help by listening and asking questions, but there is one thing that I tell everyone who wants to hear it: pick work where you like the people. How do you pick the research group you want to work with? My recommendation is to pick based on two things: Do you like the topics they work on? Do you get along with the people in the group (in particular your boss/supervisor)? The first is...

The academic publishing system is broken. I think we can all agree on that. But what if you want to have an academic career and at the same time stick to your values of openness? Here's my pragmatic take. I understand the fear of not publishing in established journals. We all want to have a good career and feel like publishing our papers in the journals that our peers and employers deem worthy seems like an important step. As a pragmatic open scientist, I generally recommend not to be too...

Have you complained about the inefficiency of public administration before? I think, you're not alone. In this post I want to share my journey with trying to help increase efficiency through data literacy in the public sector. I am a person who likes to solve problems. Most of my time is spent solving problems in academia, but I decided to leave my usual grounds for a special project where I can help solving problems in the public sector. Why do I care about solving problems in the public...