Digital Science Communication: Reproducibility, Reactivity, and Native Web Interfaces

Georgios Varnavides, Colin Ophus

Effective communication is a vital, yet often overlooked, component of scientific research. In the past decade or so, there has been a resurgence of the use of computational notebooks, which promote the idea of literate programming, allowing one to intertwine human-readable narrative with code. Still, some of the most widely-used computational notebook platforms suffer from reproducibility and interactivity issues. In this short workshop, we will introduce common computational notebook platforms, such as Jupyter notebooks, as-well as more recent tools such as Observable and Marimo notebooks (javascript and python respectively), which attempt to solve this using reactivity and illustrate how they can be embedded inside web interfaces using React components and WebAssembly to enable interactive science communication running natively in the browser.

Workshop will include live demos of the whole technology stack from data visualization to deploying web interfaces, tutorial walkthroughs of generating scientific figures/movies programmatically, as-well as guest speakers. Participants should plan to bring a laptop to follow-along, and optionally their own data they wish to visualize/deploy!

Friday, August 16

Symposium Location: B70A-3377

Symposium Schedule:

2:15 – 2:45 pm

Georgios Varnavides, Berkeley Lab

2:45 – 3:15 pm

Colin Ophus, Berkeley Lab

3:15 – 3:45 pm

Rowan Cockett, Curvenote

3:45 – 4:15 pm

4:15 – 4:45 pm

Akshay Agrawal, Marimo

4:45 – 5:15 pm

Georgios Varnavides, Berkeley Lab

5:15 – 5:45 pm

All instructors