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From data articles to code articles and methods

The 45th session of the MetSem seminar will take place on Thursday 20 June 2024 from 14:00 to 16:30. We will be welcoming Hugues Pecout (Géographie Cités) for a session entitled ‘De l'article de données à l'article de code, en passant par les méthodes’, a presentation on the practice of publishing computational documents (Notebooks) as part of the Rzine project.

Event, MetSem seminar

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Salle C002, 1 place St-Thomas d'Aquin, 75007 Paris

Introduction to the session and biography of the speaker:

The ‘Rzine articles’ are didactic documents presenting a methodology, a type of analysis, a functionality or even the processing of a certain type of data with the R language. These articles aim to share reproducible methods applicable in SHS, possibly within a multidisciplinary perimeter, in a pedagogical manner; their proofreading takes place publicly on GitHub in order to guarantee the transparency of peer evaluations, and to facilitate the work of co-construction of this computational document with the author. 

Hugues Pecout's talk will examine a number of concrete cases of Rzine articles, which primarily describe processing or analysis methods, and will look at a number of issues that cut across these new editorial formats for scientific communication, such as data papers and code articles: 

  • What scope can or should be covered by this type of article - between technical, methodological or thematic-disciplinary anchoring; how can the right mix be managed between these three anchorings? 
  • To what extent is this type of article different from the canonical research or methods articles? 
  • How can an approach rooted in a particular disciplinary field be made intelligible to the whole of the social sciences and humanities? 
  • Who are the audiences today that are capable of carrying out this exercise? What support do authors need to make the process a success? 
  • What difficulties are raised by the need to open up the codes and datasets used in such articles?

The session will be discussed by Guillaume Garcia (Centre de Données Socio-Politiques de Sciences Po), based on the recent experience of the journal DEMC - Données, Expériences, Méthodes, Codes.