The Story in the Notebook

Kery, Mary Beth; Radensky, Marissa; Arya, Mahima; John, Bonnie E.; Myers, Brad A.

doi:10.1145/3173574.3173748

Cited by 159 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Computational notebooks aim to support collaborative data analysis by enabling analysts to present their work as computational narratives that can be easily shared and understood [19]. However, prior work examining over a million notebooks and interviewing dozens of notebook users revealed that many notebooks are loose collections of notes and scripts that even the original analyst struggles to understand [15,22]. Rather than share their messy notebooks, most analysts share simplified results through media such as email, slide decks, or paper printouts that lack a notebook's interactivity, reproducibility, or context.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aiding Collaborative Reuse of Computational Notebooks with Annotated Cell Folding

Rule

Drosos

Tabard

et al. 2018

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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Computational notebooks aim to support collaborative data analysis by combining code, visualizations, and text in a single easily shared document. Yet, as notebooks evolve and grow they often become difficult to navigate or understand, discouraging sharing and reuse. We present the design and evaluation of a Jupyter Notebook extension providing facilities for annotated cell folding. Through a lab study and multi-week deployment we find cell folding aids notebook navigation and comprehension, not only by the original author, but also by collaborators viewing the notebook in a meeting or revising it on their own. However, in some cases cell folding encouraged collaborators to overlook folded sections or spend longer reviewing a notebook before editing it. These findings extend our understanding of code folding's trade-offs to a new medium and demonstrate its benefits for everyday collaboration. We conclude by discussing how dynamic reorganization can support sharing and reuse of computational notebooks.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aiding Collaborative Reuse of Computational Notebooks with Annotated Cell Folding

Rule

Drosos

Tabard

et al. 2018

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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“…Mainly, notebooks offer a different GUI for interacting with code and documentation. This interface does not clash with the more traditional GUIs such as IDEs or text editors, but it offers an enhanced interface mainly for end-user programming [35] and exploratory programming [2,29,56].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Currently, there are several studies tackling usability, cognitive, and reproducibility aspects of computational notebooks. For instance, in reproducibility [36,47,48,58], education [44], exploratory programming [2,18,29,30], documentation [76], and data journalism [78]. However, no attention has been paid from the language engineering point of view.…”

Section: :21mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bacatá: Notebooks for DSLs, Almost for Free

2020

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Context: Computational notebooks are a contemporary style of literate programming, in which users can communicate and transfer knowledge by interleaving executable code, output, and prose in a single rich document. A Domain-Specific Language (DSL) is a software language tailored for an application domain. Usually, DSL users are domain experts that may not have a software engineering background. Therefore, they might not be familiar with Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). In brief, the development of tools that offer different interfaces for interacting with a DSL is relevant.Inquiry: However, DSL designers' resources are limited. We want to leverage General-purpose Languages (GPLs) tooling in the context of DSLs. Computational notebooks are an example of such tools. Then, our main question is: What is an efficient and effective method of designing and implementing notebook interfaces for DSLs? By addressing this question, we might be able to speed up the development of DSL tools, and ease the interaction between end-users and DSLs.Approach: In this paper, we present Bacatá, a mechanism for generating notebook interfaces for external DSLs in a language-parametric fashion. This mechanism is designed in a way in which language engineers can reuse as many language components as possible (e.g., language processors, type checkers, code generators). In addition, we present a Feature-Oriented Domain Analysis that depicts language dependent and language independent features of computational notebooks.Knowledge: Our results show that notebook interfaces generated by Bacatá can be used with little manual configuration. However, there are a few considerations and caveats that should be addressed by language engineers that rely on language design aspects. The creation of a notebook for a DSL with Bacatá becomes a matter of writing the code that wires existing language components in the Rascal language workbench with the Jupyter platform.Grounding: We evaluate Bacatá by generating functional computational notebook interfaces for three different non-trivial DSLs, namely: a small subset of Halide (a DSL for digital image processing), SweeterJS (an extended version of JavaScript), and QL (a DSL for questionnaires). Additionally, it is relevant to generate notebook implementations rather than implementing them manually. To illustrate this, we measured and compared the number of source lines of code that we reused from existing implementations of those languages.Importance: The adoption of notebooks by novice-programmers and end-users has made them very popular in several domains such as exploratory programming, data science, data journalism, and machine learning. Why are they popular? In (data) science, it is essential to make results reproducible as well as understandable. However, notebooks are only available for GPLs. This paper opens the notebook metaphor for DSLs to improve the end-user experience when interacting with code and to increase DSLs adoption. ACM CCS 2012Software and its engineering → Domain specific lang...

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“…Kery et al [5] asked scientists to think about "a magical perfect record" in their study of literate programming tools. Participants created queries referring to "many kinds of contextual details, including libraries used, output, plots, [...]. "…”

Section: Machine-initiatedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ubiquitous Research Preservation: Transforming Knowledge Preservation in Computational Science

Feger¹,

Dallmeier-Tiessen²,

Knierim³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Research preservation is crucial for supporting researchers' sensemaking and knowledge sharing. However, human compliance to capturing strategies is a barrier for creating complete scientific repositories. In this paper, we introduce Ubiquitous Research Preservation, which we envision to automate preservation in computational science. We contribute a characterization of preservation processes, illustrate the spectrum of technology interventions and describe research challenges and opportunities for Ubiquitous Research Preservation in computation-based scientific domains. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Ubiquitous and mobile computing systems and tools; Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; Ubiquitous and mobile computing design and evaluation methods.

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The Story in the Notebook

Cited by 159 publications

References 18 publications

Aiding Collaborative Reuse of Computational Notebooks with Annotated Cell Folding

Aiding Collaborative Reuse of Computational Notebooks with Annotated Cell Folding

Bacatá: Notebooks for DSLs, Almost for Free

Ubiquitous Research Preservation: Transforming Knowledge Preservation in Computational Science

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