Jacquard lab notebook
Consider a hypothetical astronomy paper. Measurements are collected from a telescope and written into a raw data file, which is reduced into a smaller CSV, which is loaded into a Python analysis notebook, which outputs further intermediate data files, as well as several visualizations as PNGs, which are then dragged into a web-based collaborative LaTeX editor where the team edits the paper and refines the charts.
Through conversations with researchers in fields ranging from astrophysics to oceanography, we’ve learned that these kinds of problems cause daily friction, stealing focus from important work and even causing mistakes. Some researchers use software engineering tools like Git and Makefiles to help with these problems, but those tools are an awkward fit for exploratory research programming, and aren’t easily accessible to scientists who are less familiar with the command line.
On this project, we’re prototyping Jacquard: a collaborative environment for writing empirical research papers. The goal is to free up researchers to focus more on their core work of science and communication, and less on tedious bookkeeping. (The name “Jacquard” comes from the automated loom that was an important step in the history of computing.)
