For the Spring 2025 semester, a series of three workshops around the general theme of “Programming Skills for Publications” are planned. See below for the current schedule, and check back around the time of the workshops for more resources related to them (such as presentation slides and example notebooks). These workshops will be open to both students (of any year) and faculty/staff.
Colormaps and Color Theory for Scientific Figures
Friday, Feb 7th, 1:00-3:00 pm
ATS West Seminar Room (ATS West 121)
Learning about colors isn’t just for our earliest years of education! When we utilize colors and colormaps in our scientific figures to convey data to a given audience, we need to take into account that not everyone sees colors in the same way, nor does every medium depict colors equivalently. In this workshop, we’ll go over the essentials of color theory to help understand color spaces/models, color vision deficiency (CVD, also known as color blindness), the importance of perceptual lightness, and best practices for choosing colormaps. We’ll also cover various tools and software packages that can help you work with colors in Matplotlib (and other plotting tools) as well as make good choices for your figures to account for display/printing differences and common forms of CVD.
LaTeX and Markdown (and Modern Tools for Using Them)
Friday, Mar 7th, 1:00-3:00 pm
ATS West Seminar Room (ATS West 121)
Using mathematical notation is quite often essential in our field, but typing up our mathematical expressions often takes more effort than text alone. When equation editors in presentation or word processing applications aren’t the right tool for the job, scientists often turn towards LaTeX. Beyond that, sometimes those applications themselves don’t do what we need them to, and we instead seek an approach that can separate presentation (formatting) from content. In this workshop, we’ll start with the essentials of LaTeX that you might need to type up your mathematical notation. Then, we’ll go over the basics of how you can use either LaTeX alone or LaTeX within Markdown to write your entire scientific document/presentation, as well as showcasing several modern software tools and applications that can streamline your workflows in doing so, such as IDE plugins, Jupyter Notebooks, Overleaf, and Curvenote.
Using Git and GitHub for Tracking and Testing Research Code
Friday, Apr 11th, 1:00-3:00 pm
ATS West Seminar Room (ATS West 121)
Have you ever had a code file named something like processing_final_v3.py? Have you ever had your analysis produce incorrect results, only to trace the issue down to a single line of code in one function? There are approaches from software engineering that can help with these sorts of issues! This workshop will go over the essentials of both version control (tracking changes in code over time) and unit testing (writing code that lets us test each individual portion of our code). We’ll focus on using Git and GitHub for these, as they have many helpful features which can streamline the tracking and testing of our research code. While such additional steps can seem daunting at first, I hope by the end of this workshop you’ll be able to use these tools to actually reduce the time it takes to create reproducible and verifiable code that can be made available alongside a presentation or publication.