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For my last post of 2014, I would like to draw everyone’s attention to the on-line material about the dot Astronomy 6 Conference, held this year at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, on December 8-10. This annual meeting on on-line astronomy generally has 50-60 participants, and includes a full day hack session, on-the-fly presentations and discussion sessions, as well as traditional talks. The aim of these meetings is to use the power of the internet to unleash creative new ideas.
This year, Brooke Simmons (Day One), Meredith Rawls (Day Two) and Elisabeth Newton (Day Three) each did a fine job of recording activities. I will summarize highlights for each day, but I recommend reading the daily blogs to get a complete picture of events.
Day One: Arfon Smith described how GitHub is a powerful tool for collaborations, and Erin Braswell talked about the Open Science Frameworm, ” … a 1-stop shop bringing together all the different tools we use for science… You can compartmentalize projects into components, some of which are allowed to be private, and identify collaborators who are working on that component (so that people get appropriate credit). Version control is built in and it’s integrated with GitHub, so you can always link back to specific states of a project or file.” Dustin Lag talked about how used Astrometry.net to analyze images of Comet Holmes. Alberto Pepe talked about Authoera supports collaborative paper writing. Geert Barentzen opined that the dat deluge is largely hyped, except in radio astronomy.
Day Two: Hack day. A sampling of the offerings —
Day Three: Much of the day was devoted to demos of Day Two’s hacks. Two topics of broad interest got my attention. To quote, “Two sessions focused .Astronomy themes of open access and software development. One continued the discussion about open access journals, bringing up points about peer review and commenting, curation of articles, and the various cultural barriers to the adoption of new publishing processes. As one of the hacks showed, astronomers tend to have little or no training in that area. Another session discussed how to integrate some of these skills into graduate curricula, including both formal and informal education.”