Ever feel like coding and data management are shrouded in mystery? So much of what we do in research—writing codes, organizing data, debugging scripts—is learned through trial and error, not formal training. Join us at the Coding & Data Management Festival to learn about everyday coding practices from your colleagues and explore the tools and techniques that bring transparency and reproducibility to quantitative research. Whether you’re a seasoned quantitative researcher or just getting started, this festival will provide a space to share, learn, and demystify coding techniques. Come open the black box with us!
📅 Date: April 4, 2025
⏰ Time: 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM
📍 Location: PSC Commons
💻 Audience: Open to all faculty, students, and researchers interested in quantitative methods, coding, and data management.
Register to attend: https://forms.gle/cfZdyy6eVUiRRxHK9
Download a PDF of the event schedule for the Coding & Data Management Festival
Schedule & Details:
🕛 12:00 – 1:00 PM | Welcome & Lunch
- Kickoff and networking opportunity over lunch.
- Brief introduction to the event and the QM Working Group’s mission.
👀 1:15 – 2:45 PM | Show & Tell
- Participants share coding workflows, tools, or data visualization they use for research.
- 5–10-minute lightning talks starting with guess the coder & followed by Q&A.
- Topics might include best practices in data cleaning and management in STATA/R/Python, reproducibility strategies, or recent projects.
- Two Truths and a Bug: Each participant shares:
- Two true facts about their coding or research experience.
- One “bug”—a funny or frustrating coding mistake they’ve made in the past.
- Superlatives (10 minutes): Participants will nominate and vote on fun coding-related superlatives. Awards will be given to those who participated in the Show & Tell and receive the most votes. Categories will include:
- 🧼 Most Organized – Who demonstrated the most readable and well-structured code?
- ⚡Most Efficient – Who had the fewest lines of code or fastest-running script to achieve their goal?
- 🎭Most Chaotic – Whose code looks wild, unstructured, or unconventional but still works?
- 🎨 Most Creative – Who used the most creative approach to solve a problem? Or, who used the most creative visualizations?
☕ 2:45 – 3:00 PM | Coffee Break
- Time to chat and exchange ideas informally.
🖥️ 3:00 – 4:00 PM | Session on Data Management
- Introduction to GitHub: Basics of version control, collaboration, and best practices for research. Slides
- Introduction to OSF (Open Science Framework): Organizing and sharing research data and preprints.
- Introduction to RShiny Apps or CRAN: A hands-on demo of creating interactive visualizations with RShiny Apps (or an alternative focus on CRAN package management).
- Introduction to Research Documentation: How to ensure your research is usable by yourself and others through documentation, such as README’s and data dictionaries. Slides
🎉 4:00 – 5:00 PM | Code Connection Games & Happy Hour
- Debug the Code: The moderator will show codes that have intentional errors, such as missing parentheses, typos, incorrect calculations, infinite loops, misuse of functions or variables, and missing dependencies or incorrect imports. Participants will analyze the code and identify the bugs as quickly as possible.
- 🧐 Sharpest Eye Award – Fastest debugging
- Guess the Coder: Participants submit short code snippets before the event. Codes will be anonymized. The moderator will display the snippets on the screens. Participants will look for hints about the author’s identity (commenting style, use of certain data and variables, or formatting preferences).
- 🔎 Code Sleuth Award – Given to the participant with the most correct guesses.
