Shaing Code Among Academic Researchers: Lessons Learned

Abstract

Academic researchers have been collecting data and pro- gramming scripts to process and analyze them for years. Re- searchers have studied the difficulty in sharing data alone, but sharing the scripts required to reproduce results has been discussed less often. At the Collective Action and So- cial Media (CASM) Lab at the Illinois Institute of Technol- ogy, we study how people use social media to engage with their communities. Our interdisciplinary team consists of students with various technical backgrounds. Since everyone in the lab needs to run code, we have developed a standard repository structure. We will share the structure definition and explain the reasoning behind our design decisions. We aim to make our data and code accessible to social scientists not trained in information retrieval, so we frame this paper from that perspective. By publicizing our approach we invite researchers with similar goals to build on our work, collab- orate on the design and implementation of modern tools to share code and data, and to suggest improvements to our process.