by Torsten Hothorn and Susanne Dandl

Researchers have always been responsible for creating and maintaining their own research environment tailored to the specific needs and challenges in their field of research. With the rise of open research practices, it becomes a more and more common task to demonstrate, to peers and the general public, that these research environments are in fact suitable in the sense that research findings produced under the conditions of these environments are methodologically sound and, as an ultimate goal, reproducible.

In empirical research, computer systems play a pivotal role in research environments, as they are used to collect, to manage, to analyse, and to publish data from relevant experiments. In an ideal world, all cascades of this pipeline are under full control of the investigators ensuring that published results have been obtained from a well-run experiment and a well-defined data analysis procedure.

By definition, closed source software cannot be part of such a system, simply because it is impossible to understand, validate, criticise, or improve the way such software products work. Since the beginning of the computer age in the 1950ies, researchers have invested considerable time and energy to develop and maintain a free research software universe giving all of its users the right to understand, validate, criticise, and improve programs relevant for their research tasks.

In recent months, the concept of Digital/IT Sovereignty received increasing attention. Concerns regarding data privacy and security risks associated with strong dependencies on foreign cloud infrastructure have not only been raised by researchers but in the general public. Protecting research integrity by building resilience against compromised, or simply quiescent, network services is therefore on everybody’s agenda.

The aim of this workshop is to introduce researchers and students to the free research software universe and help them to navigate this world. Seminar participants will install a free operating system on computers and will learn how to set-up and maintain a computing environment covering all aspects of empirical research, most importantly the management, analysis, and reporting of data.

The seminar will focus on the following topics:

  • Installing a Free Operating System
  • Making the System Secure
  • Surviving in Hostile Environments
  • Communication and Data Management
  • Data Analysis
  • Typesetting
  • Reporting
  • Long-term Stability

Workshop participants will be provided with a laptop. We meet Wednesday September 10 from 13:00 to 17:00 and Thursday September 11 from 9:00 to 15:00 in Hirschengraben 82 HIT-E03. Please register by email to Torsten Hothorn, Torsten.Hothorn@uzh.ch.