Welcome to the Brain, Data, and Science blog
Papers are often too long and too cumbersome to write. Tweets are too short to say anything at the necessary level of detail. Sometimes we spend considerable time to solve a problem, but it's simply not enough to write a full paper on it - and so the progress ends up in the file drawer. On the other hand, I often find myself coming back to the same problem again and again, and I am very happy if I have a written note that explains the details. If I can find it, that is. So we have often thought that it would be great to have a shareable home for these small pieces of insights, thoughts, or musings. This year I am on sabbatical - so one of my projects is to start this Brain, Data, and Science blog, writing about Brain Science, Data Science, and well - Science in general.
If I spend time writing, I want the end result to look good. The text, the layout and the figures should work together to promote understanding and get the idea across without unnecessary fuss. Form should follow function. Data should present itself. Edward Tufte's work If you are not familiar with his work, start with The visual display of quantitative information has always inspired me and for this blog I am stealing unabashedly from himThe layout of the blog uses the Tufte CSS created by David Liepman. For data visualization, I want play around with new ways of creating interactive graphics, so many figures you will see are using the open source library plotly.
Unfortunately, we did not find a way to achieve the look that we were aiming for within a standard blogging platform. So I wrote my own. It took about 3 times as long as I thought and it is far from perfect - but here we are. Going forward, we hopefully will be posting many interesting and engaging blogs from different members of the Sensorimotor Superlab and other colleagues. If you are interested in contributing your own piece to the blog, we would love to hear from you! You can write the blog in markdown and the content management system will generate the corresponding html documents. The code, example blogs, and the sources for all published blogs are openly shared on our BrainDataScienceBlog Github repository.
We are also attaching a Tweet to every blog, so you can comment on it below. We are looking forward to the discussions!
Jörn Diedrichsen