Posts from 2015-12
From facts to narratives
A recurrent theme in computational science (and elsewhere) is the need to combine machine-readable information (which in the following I will call "facts" for simplicity) with a narrative for the benefit of human readers. The most obvious situation is a scientific publication, which is essentially a narrative explaining the context and motivation for a study, the work that was undertaken, the results that were observed, and conclusions drawn from these results. For a scientific study that made use of computation (which is almost all of today's research work), the narrative refers to various computational facts, in particular machine-readable input data, program code, and computed results.
Tags: computational science, computer-aided research, digital scientific notations, emacs, mmtk, mobile computing, polycrisis, programming, proteins, python, rants, reproducible research, science, scientific computing, scientific software, social networks, software, source code repositories, sustainable software
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