The Carpentries

The Carpentries

Founder	Greg Wilson
Location	California, USA
Executive Director	Kari L. Jordan
Website	https://carpentries.org
Formerly called	Software Carpentry Foundation

The Carpentries is a non-profit organization that teaches computer programming and data science skills to researchers through instructional workshops.^[1][2] The Carpentries is made up of three programs areas: Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry.

The Carpentries workshops have been run internationally, including workshops at the Smithsonian,^[3] the Australian Research Data Commons,^[4] CERN,^[5] and in Antarctica.^[6]

History

Software Carpentry workshops began in 1998 as week-long training courses. The Software Carpentry Foundation was formed in 2014 alongside the sibling foundation, Data Carpentry.^[7] These organizations were merged in 2018 to form what is now known as The Carpentries.^[2] In 2018, Library Carpentry became the third lesson program of The Carpentries.^[1]

Workshops

Carpentries workshops are two-day workshops led by volunteer instructors who have been certified through the organization's training program.^[8][9] Content covered in a standard workshop includes using the command line and an introduction to a programming language such as R or Python.^[1][10] Workshops under the Data Carpentry program focus on specific subject domains, such as life sciences or social sciences.^[8]

A Software Carpentry workshop is designed as an active learning and collaborative experience. The lesson content is a hands-on with practice following instructors live coding, while helpers are ready to assist students and keep the class pace. Training covers the core skills needed to be productive in a small research team. Tutorials in the lesson alternate with practical exercises, were collaboration is attempt. There is a collaborative document were the learning process is constructed. ^[11] [ https://carpentries.github.io/instructor-training/index.html | workshop guidelines]

Lessons

Stable lessons

All lesson content under The Carpentries curriculum are licensed openly under Creative Commons licenses.^[1][9]

Before being adopted as an official Carpentries lesson, new lessons go through a series of stages designed to ensure they are sufficiently documented to be teachable by instructors outside of the initial author group.

The Carpentries shares The Carpentries Community Developed Lessons (there are three core topics: the Unix shell, version control with Git, and a programming language (Python or R). Curricula for these lessons in English and Spanish (select lessons only) and also Data Carpentry's lessons (which focus on data organization, cleanup, analysis, and visualization).

The Carpentries Community Developed Lessons

Here are six stable lessons in total:

• The Unix Shell

This lesson comprises The Unix Shell organization This is a power tool that allows people to do complex things with just a few keystrokes and automate repetitive tasks. Use of the shell is fundamental to using a wide range of other powerful tools and computing resources.

• Version Control with Git

This lesson comprises Version Control with Git

• Programming with Python

This lesson comprises Programming with Python

• Plotting and Programming in Python

This lesson comprises Plotting and Programming in Python

• Programming with R

This lesson comprises Programming with R

• R for Reproducible Scientific Anlalysis

This lesson comprises R for Reproducible Scientific Analysis

Data Carpentry's lessons

• Ecology lessons

This lesson comprises Ecology Workshop Overview

• Genomics lessons

This lesson comprises Genomic Workshop Overview The data use in this lesson is part of the Lenski experiment. This lesson starts from thinking a genomic research, using the terminal to asses quality and goes until variation analysis.

• Social lessons

This lesson comprises Social Science Workshop Overview

• Geospatial data lessons

This lesson comprises Geospatial data lessons

Community developed lesson

The Carpentries community is commited to a collaborative and open process for lesson development and to sharing teaching materials. The Carpentries incubator ^[12] contains lessons developed by community members. These lessons comprises a life cicle from pre-alpha, where just the idea is presented, until beta where the lesson has been run in a workshop by instructors different by the authors. There are 4 stages: pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and stable.

Pre-alpha : In a few words is the draft from the initial lesson idea. Before you start developing a new lesson, it is important check to see if there are already people working on creating a lesson for your topic. In this step a repository in the appropriate GitHub organization will be created, using The Carpentries lesson template to develop the content.

Alpha : Original authors of the new lesson organize an alpha pilot workshop at their home organisation, the goal here is to collect and incorporate feedback from learners and co-instructor. This happens a few times to bring the lesson to where it is ready to be taught by other members of The Carpentries.

The two lessons in beta stages are Reproducible Computational Environments using Containers and Data Harvesting for Agriculture. Carpentries incubator have approximately 30 lessons available in alpha stage, ranging from From a SpreadSheet to a Database through Python for Humanities and Metagenomics. There is another main way for community members to share lessons material: The CarpentriesLab, which is a repository for high-quality, peer-reviewed, short-format, lessons that use the teaching approach and lesson design from The Carpentries. Also you can getting peer-review on the content of a lesson by submitting it to The Incubator through Carpentries GitHub Repository.

The lessons from both Carpentries Incubator and CarpentriesLab can be taught in meetups, classes or as complements to a "stardard" 2-day Carpentries workshop. Independent learners can also used the lessons, even outside of workshops.

Other language lessons

The Carpentries community has developed spanish versions of its core lessons which are the Unix shell, version control with Git and R as a programming language. In 2021 the stable lessons available in spanish are:

• La Terminal de Unix
• El Control de Versiones con Git
• R para Análisis Científicos Reproducibles

Funding

The Carpentries is fiscally sponsored by Community Initiatives^[13] and funded through a combination of memberships, workshop fees, grants and donations. The Carpentries has over 70 member organizations,^[14] including the Software Sustainability Institute,^[15] the National Institute of Standards and Technology,^[16] New Zealand eScience Infrastructure,^[17] and Compute Canada.^[18]

In November 2017, the Library Carpentry program received a supplemental Institute of Museum and Library Services grant, in partnership with the California Digital Library, valued at $249,553.^[19][20]

In November 2019, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation announced a joint award of $2.65 million for The Carpentries.^[21]

References

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