Article Proposal: Ring Species in Fedora's Outer Ring

Project Conversations Magazine
#1

Summary: Provide an appreciation of open-source software in evolutionary biology research to the Fedora community using SLiM (available in Copr)

Description: provide an overview of how my ecology research and career has progressed thanks to Linux, and Fedora. The article will aim to introduce users to ecology and evolutionary biology by showing them:

  1. the presence of GNU and libre software in scientific research.
  2. how to install SLiM, an evolutionary simulation framework from Copr
  3. how to load a ‘recipe’ to learn the features of the scripting language, Eidos, and the SLiMgui development environment
  4. freely available resources for learning biology

I would be suited to write this article, as I have used the software in my undergraduate research for two years, and I am the package maintainer for SLiM on Fedora-type Linuxes. The developer of SLiM has agreed to an interview, and I may include this in the article if I come up with any interesting questions to ask.

An article in the magazine that interested me was “Jupyter and data science in Fedora.” I have used Jupyter Notebooks a little bit in my work, but I could follow-up on that article if this present proposal is interesting enough to become a series of articles.

Summary: introduce users to Jupyter kernels by showing how to install and configure the R kernel

Description: a previous article in the magazine detailed Jupyter and data science in Fedora; this article details how to make use of an R kernel in Fedora to use GNU R for statistical analysis and visualization. Specifically:

  1. How to install the R kernel using dnf
  2. Configuring Jupyter to use the kernel in a notebook
  3. A short introduction to R
  4. How to visualize some SLiM output with R
2 Likes
#2

+1 That sounds really interesting. I wonder if it’s worth splitting into multiple articles: an intro to R and then the science with SLiM?

#3

+1 I am also wondering the same as @bcotton regarding splitting content. I will hold making the card(s) till your response.

#4

Hi Ben,

Writing multiple articles would be best. Do you want the article on GNU R to be first?

Considering the progression of ideas I would like to communicate, I think this flow of ideas in the first article would be appropriate:

  1. Introduce GNU R
  2. Explain setup of the Jupyter R kernel
  3. Provide a tutorial on R
  4. Encourage engagement by referring to a future article on SLiM, and how we can use our new R knowledge to analyze the output (that is, welcome readers to wait for the second article)
  5. Share resources for learning R
#5

That sounds good, although you might want to think about dropping #4. The reason I suggest this is that a generic “introduction to R” article can be a great base for many future articles to build off of. So if you do include that, I’d keep it as a sentence at the end; don’t make it a key part of the article. Does that seem reasonable?

#6

Yes. I will instead refer back to the “Introduction to R” in subsequent articles.