Research Design

Organized Code Repositories Accelerate Science and Facilitate Reproducubility

March 2, 2021

Computational and data-driven research increasingly requires developing complex codebases. At the same time, many scientists don’t receive training in software engineering practices, resulting in, for some, the perception that scientists write terrible software. As scientists, good software should accelerate our work and facilitate its reproducibility. While building good coding practices takes some time and experience, it doesn’t require a...

The Importance of Design Plans for Data Science

April 20, 2021

Since becoming a Data Fellow at the D-Lab, I have had the opportunity to assist many talented social scientists through the D-Lab’s Consulting service. A regular consulting request is to help with the research design for a new project. These requests are understandable. For empirical researchers, a high-quality research design makes or breaks a research project. In this post, I suggest a few benefits of writing a skeleton design plan before writing any code whatsoever.

One of the exciting aspects...