Alum Stuart Geiger at JupyterCon
BCNM alum Stuart Geiger gave a presentation on observed engagements and rituals among Jupyter users at the official Jupyter conference on August 25. He presented these ethnograpghic findings with Charlotte Cabasse-Mazel, fellow postdoctoral scholar from the UC Berkeley Institute of Data Science, and Brittany Fiore-Gartland, the director of Data Science Ethnography from the University of Washington.
From the Jupyter Conference event page:
Stuart, Brittany, and Charlotte’s analysis draws from James Carey’s foundational theory of communication as transmission versus ritual, which is a useful way to think about the goals of Jupyter notebooks and related technologies. Communication is often understood as the transmission of information from one person to another, so good communication is achieved when the ideas inside the mind of the speaker make it into the mind of the listener. However, Carey notes that communication is also often a ritual in which people work to establish a shared context and sustain a common understanding of why we are here and what we are doing. Jupyter notebooks are certainly used to effectively communicate scientific or analytic narratives of computation. However, Jupyter also plays an important role in supporting and changing various ritual practices that take place around computational analysis.
The conference itself was a four-day event in late August that offered work sessions, practical tutorials, networking, and keynote speaker presentations to its attendees. The activities educated participants on real-world applications and practices that they could emulate when using their own Jupyter Notebooks, implementing the best methods for "collaborative and reproducible data science."