Designing Future Computational Notebooks for Collaboration and Learning
Wednesday, February 22, 2023 11:30 AM
About this Event
April Wang
PhD Candidate
School of Information
University of Michigan
Computing technologies allow people to work, learn, and socialize remotely but seamlessly together, particularly over complex computational tasks like programming and data science. Yet, collaboration in data science is often hard. Since data science is highly exploratory, the artifact and analysis often iterate fast. It is difficult to maintain a shared understanding across various collaborators. On the other hand, tools like computational notebooks provide a convenient approach for data scientists to run, document, and share analysis in a storytelling way. However, there are still many open-ended questions about how to improve the collaboration experience by designing better collaborative data science tools. For example, data scientists often neglect to keep updated documentation during rapid exploration, which results in computational notebooks that are messy and difficult to read; without strategic planning, working together in a shared notebook may block each other's work. My research draws upon human-centered design techniques to identify barriers in real-world data science programming practices, and explore the design space of collaborative data science environments through tool-building.
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https://wustl.zoom.us/j/97318054896?pwd=L3Q3QVFaRzJJR0loMTAvNVQ0M3pmUT09
About this Event
April Wang
PhD Candidate
School of Information
University of Michigan
Computing technologies allow people to work, learn, and socialize remotely but seamlessly together, particularly over complex computational tasks like programming and data science. Yet, collaboration in data science is often hard. Since data science is highly exploratory, the artifact and analysis often iterate fast. It is difficult to maintain a shared understanding across various collaborators. On the other hand, tools like computational notebooks provide a convenient approach for data scientists to run, document, and share analysis in a storytelling way. However, there are still many open-ended questions about how to improve the collaboration experience by designing better collaborative data science tools. For example, data scientists often neglect to keep updated documentation during rapid exploration, which results in computational notebooks that are messy and difficult to read; without strategic planning, working together in a shared notebook may block each other's work. My research draws upon human-centered design techniques to identify barriers in real-world data science programming practices, and explore the design space of collaborative data science environments through tool-building.