Highlights from AU NZ Carpentries Community Call in July 2023
On 20 July, Nisha Ghatak (NeSI) and Mary Filsell (ARDC) hosted the third Carpentries communities discussion for members in Australia and New Zealand.
Focus
The aim of the event was to bring together members of both communities across the Tasman to discuss the new Carpentries lesson on Image Processing with Python: why, when and how to teach it. Jacob Deppen (Corteva Agriscience, USA) and David Palmquist (CSU Fullerton, USA) joined us to talk about the motivations behind the lesson and share tips on how to teach it. Image processing with Python is a new Data Carpentry lesson which introduces an open source toolkit for analysing image data and to solve genuine image analysis problems.
Discussion
The guest speakers provided some history on how the course developed and who was involved. The speakers provided context on how images are everywhere and how one must recognise that image data is different to tabular/data format. There was elaboration on how such a lesson assumes prior Python knowledge. The speakers delved into the intricasies of using this lesson to analyse images from various fields like bioinformatics, biology, health sciences, engineering, to name a few. They also touched upon what was not included in the lesson - such as deep learning, allowing attendees to get a holistic understanding of what is to be expected from such a new lesson.
The speakers briefly talked about the maintainers community within the Carpentries and emphasized on the importance of giving back to the community by pitching into lessons on github. The best way to start getting involved is to start with making contribtions- this can range from commenting on issues or pull requests or simply stimulating the discussion, which is already a great contribution!
For new members, getting involved with the maintainer community in a practical way is a wonderful process to ease yourself into the Carpentries community.
To know more about what was discussed in the call, check out the notes here.
Moving Forward
Thank you to everyone who joined us on this call - especially the speakers who despite the difference in timezones were able to present and take time to have discussions with our attendees! We appreciated the ideas that were shared, the challenges addressed and the solutions put forth. Please feel free to check out notes from the call here.
Our next community discussion is scheduled for Thursday, 14 Sep 2pm Auckland, 10am Perth, 12pm Sydney, 2am UTC (See in your timezone)
