The User's Guide Project: Looking Back and Looking Forward

Abstract

The editorial staff of JHM works hard to make sure the scholarship disseminated in JHM is accurate and upholds professional ethical guidelines. However the views and opinions expressed in each published manuscript belong exclusively to the individual contributor(s). The publisher and the editors do not endorse or accept responsibility for them. SynopsisIn 2014 Luke Wolcott created the User's Guide Project, in which a group of algebraic topologists came together to write user's guides to coincide with their research papers in hopes of making their research more accessible. We examine the role of this innovative project within the greater mathematics community. We discuss the structure and history of the project, its impact on the community, and its value to the participants of the project. We end by encouraging the math community to recognize the value of the project and expand the User's Guide Project to other subfields.

Using Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) to Represent the Data Generating Mechanisms of Disease and Healthcare Pathways: A Guide for Educators, Students, Practitioners and Researchers

“…These approaches, techniques and devices include: improving the accessibility of specialist or technical language (e.g. [6]; this volume); providing accessible or 'plain language' summaries and 'visual abstracts' of 'key findings' [7]; creating so-called 'user guides' to explicate the 'experiential context' of specialist applications (see for example [8]; and https://mathusersguides.com/); and using a variety of visualisation practices to simplify and demystify the techniques involved and the information these generate [2,[9][10][11].…”

Using Directed Acyclic Graphs (Dags) to Represent the Data Generating Mechanisms of Disease and Healthcare Pathways: A Guide for Educators, Students, Practitioners and Researchers

“…These approaches, techniques and devices include: improving the accessibility of specialist or technical language (e.g. Watt, 2022; this volume); providing accessible or 'plain language' summaries and 'visual abstracts' of 'key findings' (Chapman et al, 2019); creating so-called 'user guides' to explicate the 'experiential context' of specialist applications (see for example: Larson et al, 2020; and https://mathusersguides.com/); and using a variety of visualisation practices to simplify and demystify the techniques involved and the information these generate (Hibbard and Peters, 2003;Bartlett and Gagnon, 2016;Kennedy et al, 2016;Passera, 2018).…”