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Open science as a movement and the art of Openscapes

Dr. Julia Stewart Lowndes

Dr. Allison Horst

slides: openscapes.org/media

All artwork by Allison Horst

CascadiaR Conference Keynote, June 5, 2021

Assistant Teaching Professor

Bren School of Environmental Science and Management

UC Santa Barbara

@allison_horst

Openscapes Co-Director

National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis

UC Santa Barbara

@juliesquid

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Open science

“A collaborative culture enabled by technology that empowers the open sharing of data, information and knowledge within the scientific community and the wider public to accelerate scientific research and understanding” Ramachandran et al. 2021

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Co-director: Erin Robinson

Co-founder: Jamie Montgomery

Helpers: Jamie Montgomery, Jessica Couture

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Julie: I used to feel like this about data analysis. This is Luke Skywalker when he crashed his plane into the swamp of Dagobah, and he is staring at a challenge he can’t solve with the skillsets he has. I felt demoralized like this as a graduate student when I was first learning how to code, and then again with my research team as we were struggling to code together. I felt like this in big ways like overhauling the workflows that I’d developed over my whole career and small ways like missing a parentheses or trying to distinguish between 10 files with names ending in final_final and final_final_final. I constantly felt that I was alone, behind, and that it was too late to catch up.

Allison: I also felt like this as a PhD student, and then as a lecturer fumbling my way through my first several years of learning and teaching R without any formal training - which is pretty common for environmental scientists. So I knew well this feeling that Julie was describing when she brought up the idea for this Luke Skywalker analogy. Having been stuck in the swamp myself made it really easy and rewarding to capture Luke’s feeling of despair in an illustration.

Transition: Julie: Luckily, this isn’t the end of Luke’s story, because as we know –

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Julie: Luke meets Yoda. And Yoda uses the Force to solve Luke’s problem in a way Luke never imagined was possible. The Force is going to open up Luke's whole world because it will solve his current challenge and also broaden his mindset to what is possible in the future. For me, the Force is open science. And I’ve met many Yodas in the R and open science communities who supported me as a new learner and helped me feel like I wasn’t alone and that it wasn’t too late. My Yodas were people I met at my very first open science event. which was an rOpenSci unconference. They were RLadies who role modeled how support women and promote gender diversity in the R community, and folks from RStudio who were patient with my questions as I tried to understand how RMarkdown could be used not only for reproducibility but for communicating science beyond my wildest dreams.

Allison: For me, meeting Julie and participating in Openscapes has been a “meeting Yoda” experience. I was learning mostly alone and didn’t even realize some of the open data science tools I was missing out on - and maybe most importantly, I also had no idea about the R and open science communities that have been so supportive for my own work and teaching.

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Julie: The R and open science communities helped me work more reproducibly and collaborate better with my research team. But they also taught me that there are teams all around me. Being part of the open science movement has made me completely reimagine how I define teams. I used to think that collaborators were limited to people working on a specific project with me. But now I think of collaborators as people who enrich my work through the packages they develop or the teaching resources they share. I again think in terms of of Star Wars, where teams were powerful because they were diversity in terms of backgrounds and expertise, and everyone contributed in really critical ways towards a shared vision.

Allison: One thing I’ve learned is that even as a teacher and artist, both which can sometimes be viewed as a solo effort, I’m always working as part of a team - I’ve just had to expand what I think about as a “team” in science beyond a traditional research group. My teaching assistants are part of my team, students are part of my team, and everyone who shares inspiration, ideas and feedback in the R community is part of a team I feel supported by. And depending on the task at hand, our roles change -- for example, many days the TAs are the actual Yoda and I’m Chewbacca just trying to make sure our ship doesn’t completely fall apart.

[pause]

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An open data science mentorship program for science teams

We support researchers to:

Reimagine data analysis & stewardship as a collaborative effort
Develop modern skills that are of immediate value to them
Cultivate collaborative and inclusive research communities

OPENSCAPES CHAMPIONS

openscapes.org

Julie: Openscapes Champions is an open data science mentorship program for research teams.

We support researchers to reimagine data analysis & stewardship as a collaborative effort

We help them develop modern skills that are of immediate value to them, including technical, collaborative, and leadership skills

And we help cultivate collaborative and inclusive research communities as part of the bigger open science movement

---- cutting room floor ---

Nope:

Allison: Illustration to feel like open science. Would go on hikes together and see these landscapes that Julie said felt like the way she wanted Openscapes to feel. Scale that feeling through artwork.

OHI: 4 years: becoming part of the community, learning workflow,

I wanted to help other people do this in a way that was more faster.

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The Openscapes Champions Program helps researchers move from lonely science as they explore and navigate the open science landscape with their teams

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updated from Wickham & Grolemund

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Through the Champions program we’ve been working with a lot of awesome groups like NASA and NOAA who book the Champions Program for teams within their research communities, as well as with groups like Mozilla and the Moore Foundation who’ve sponsored the Champions Program so that teams from across different research fields can participate.

[animate] And there is such exciting momentum. I love this tweet from Malin Pinsky who says a colleague just reanalyzed the genomic data they had published, and that the open data helped them in their research. It’s so exciting to see people like Malin, who is a marine ecologist studying the impacts of climate change, become a champion in the open science movement

[pause]

--- cutting room ----

First cohort was in 2019

Through this program some of the takeaways were

8 cohorts by the end of 2021: researchers from academia, NOAA, NASA

Since 2019 we have mentored 13 teams in academia and NOAA, and they really have transformed how they work and embraced open science.

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3 major ways Openscapes changed how I do & teach environmental data science:

Better collaborator / curriculum developer

Modernized courses

Braver sharing open educational resources

Allison - And I wanted to offer some personal perspective on Openscapes. I was a Champion in the first Openscapes cohort in 2019, with my co-teacher Dr. Jessica Couture. Some major changes in our materials and mindsets were:

(1) Together we learned and practiced skills to make our curriculum development, sharing, and review more streamlined and efficient. So it saved us a bunch of time in the long term

(2) Based on what we’d learned and implemented, I felt confident to modernize my courses to better reflect what environmental data science is in the real world today: collaborative, more open, and with open source tools that streamline reproducible team science and communication.

(3) Because of the supportive network, feedback and skills I gained in Openscapes, I felt braver sharing Open Educational Resources - which had seemed really scary before, but is now just built in to how I work.

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"The internship...has made me so appreciative of all the skills you equipped us with. We were actually able to tag team an introduction to GitHub for our supervisor which was a super empowering experience."

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Dr. Alison Hill (RStudio)

Dr. Kristen B. Gorman (University of Alaska Fairbanks)

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Open science as a movement

empathy, inclusion, kindness

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Tidy Data Illustrated Series

CC By Julie Lowndes & Allison Horst

Reuse: These slides (low res) • Blog • Twitter • GitHub

Please cite as: "Illustrations from the Openscapes blog Tidy Data for reproducibility, efficiency, and collaboration by Julia Lowndes and Allison Horst"

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Open science fuels opportunity for inclusion and new ideas

Sharing imperfect art/code enables more innovation, less reinventing
Collaboration requires trust and safety
Never a _final_final_final

CLOSING THOUGHTS

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Open science as a movement and the art of Openscapes

Thank you!

All artwork by @allison_horst

See more at openscapes.org/gallery

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References & some further resources:

Allison Horst’s stats illustrations - Horst 2018+
From Open Data to Open Science - Ramachandran, Bugbee, & Murphy 2021
Palmerpenguins R package - Horst, Hill, & Gorman 2020
Palmer Archipelago penguins in the palmerpenguins R package: an alternative to Anderson’s Irises - Horst, Hill, & Gorman 2021 (submitted)
Tidy data illustrated series - Lowndes & Horst 2020
R for Excel Users - Lowndes & Horst 2020
Open software means kinder science - Lowndes 2019
Supercharge y our research - Lowndes et al. 2019
Our path to better science in less time using open data science tools - Lowndes et al. 2017
rOpenSci's leadership in #rstats culture - Openscapes blog about RStudio::conf(2020)
A chat with Tara Robertson - Openscapes blog about promoting diversity, equity, & inclusion
How Diversity Makes Us Smarter - Phillips 2014
How Kindness is Part of an Excellent STEM Education - Estrada 2021