Tutorials: How to use computers💻
2024, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
Working as a research scientist at an interdisciplinary research institute means that your colleagues often have widely different backgrounds than you.
In this day and age, almost everyone has at least one computer-like device (I mean your mobile phone). However, doing scientific research with digital data requires some nerdy skills🤓, which sometimes scares off normal people😨😨.
To help colleagues and friends in our group and at our institute, I have prepared some light-hearted presentations to cover a few tricks (the list is growing):
- 2024-05-15, Data/code management—Where should I put my files?
- 2024-08-07, Data/code management.git—How do I use Git?
- 2024-08-21, How do I edit a file in a Terminal? 🤷
- 2024-10-20, Open Questions for Computing Language for Open Science
Resources
- The Missing Semester of Your CS Education: This is a very cool series of lectures from MIT for new students majoring in Computer Science. I don’t think all music researchers need to know everything here (while definitely useful). I have taken lots of inspiration from this.
- A lecture on Scientific Computing Languages: for economists using high-performance computing for their research, Dr. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, introduces general-purpose languages (GPL) and domain-specific languages (DSL) for scientific computation: Python is a good GPL. But eventually you “want” to learn C++. R is a good DSL. Matlab still remains relevant. Julia is promising but still very young.