Executable books make campaign data tangible

Large field campaigns dedicated to study the earth system are run by large groups of people from many research institutions that are scattered around the globe. That way, it is possible to create a great wealth of original datasets, thoroughly quantifying the state of a specific region in space and time on our planet. All collected data is potentially very useful for model validation, process studies, teaching and more. But while researchers way beyond those participating at the field campaign might be interested in the data, even those participating are often faced by difficulties to discover, access and use the data.

To tackle these challenges in the context of the EUREC4A field campaign, we started the „How to EUREC4A“ executable book project. It is an openly accessible online book, written collaboratively by participants from the field campaign and the broader community around. The book contains explanations about the available instruments, data and typical usage patterns. The book is also an executable book, which means that each of the chapters contain explanatory text, code and figures that can be modified by readers, either on their own computer or without any prior setup using an online service called „binder“. Thus, the book also forms a collection of data quicklooks and is an interactive plotting software at the same time.

On first sight, the book might seem to be just yet another shiny user interface, similar to other data catalogs. But due to the way it is made, it really becomes the hub of a larger ecosystem. In order to make the book executable by everyone, data must be openly accessible and understandable to everyone, thus the book fosters the creation and maintenance of a comprehensive data catalog and the publication of datasets in an analysis friendly way. Every time the book is executed, we can test if the data is still accessible and still compatible. Furthermore, making beautiful and understandable usage examples for your dataset makes your data visible to a broader community, feels rewarding and motivates others to do the same. As the book lives due to motivated contributors, this creates a positive feedback loop to enlarge the collection of accessible and understandable data.