Reproducible Research in the Small

As most of you know, I’m a big fan of reproducible research and have written about it many times. I usually think of it as something you do with a large project that is going to produce one or more journal articles but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Titus von der Malsburg has a nice example of a small experiment that he wrote up in Org mode using reproducible research techniques and published as a gist. If you click on the Raw button you can see the Org mode source.

Notice how you have a complete package: you can read the write-up in a nicely formatted document complete with graphs and tables and you can also see the source document with all the data and R code used to make the calculations. This is the perfect way to share the results of an experiment with team members or with colleagues in other locations. They can check your calculations or use your work as a jumping off point for further research.

Howard Abrams has written about using Org mode as a way of sharing DevOps experiments with colleagues. Malsburg’s gist shows another example of using Org mode to share results with others in a low effort way. You can publish the gist and email interested parties with the URL. Publishing as a gist means that even those benighted souls not using Emacs can see your results presented in a nice manner and still see the (text based) source document.

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