Slides for my talk at IAGLR 2015. View slide deck.
Kara H. Woo, Stephanie E. Hampton, Aaron W.E. Galloway
Interest in winter limnology has increased in recent years, yet still relatively little is known about ecological dynamics under ice in seasonally frozen lakes. A synthesis project is underway to examine these dynamics using data collected from global researchers. Challenges for syntheses involving geographically distributed colleagues include integrating heterogeneous data, managing communications from inception to conclusion, and building a sense of community. We describe techniques we used to integrate and manage data throughout each stage of the project, beginning with the early step of gauging interest from 120 researchers using an online survey. We used these survey results to tailor our subsequent request for ecological data, which was accompanied by policies on data sharing and collaboration for prospective collaborators. Our data entry template was designed to make data comparable across systems while both minimizing the effort of combining researchers' data into one data set and reducing potential anxiety about data sharing. Additionally we developed an R software package to automate data quality assurance. Project files and analyses are hosted on a website to which collaborators have access, with clear expectations for access and use, and the data will ultimately be published in an open access data repository.
I am using Slidify to write this
presentation. slidify("woo_underice_iaglr_2015.Rmd") will create HTML slides.
There's a makefile to create HTML and PDF slides simultaneously (make all);
the PDF generation was adapted from
this gist with some tweaks to the
slide size. PhantomJS and CasperJS are required to build the PDF. I followed
these instructions to install
PhantomJS. To install CasperJS on Ubuntu 14.04:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nodejs
sudo npm install -g casperjs
The makefile also copies the PDF to a new file with the name format required by
IAGLR (dayofmonth_room_time_surname); this is .gitignoreed.
I have downgraded the stringr package to v. 0.6.2 for building these slides.
See this thread.