Scholarship for Explorable Research

Nextjournal is a web-based tool that helps researchers and data scientists streamline their data-driven workflows. It combines code, prose, data and results into interactive, shareable articles.

On-demand cloud-computing and automatic versioning of all content, data and the full computational environment allow for rapid experimentation with your code and data. You can go back in time, any time.

This underlying versioning technology also enables Nextjournal’s articles to be easily shared and remixed by peers as a starting point for their own articles. Other articles’ computational environments can be referenced and re-used while all attribution is automatically stored.

Articles can contain multiple programming languages (currently Julia, R, Bash, Python, and Clojure) for building sophisticated data-driven workflows with rich documentation and narrative in context with code.

We invest heavily in providing unprecedented transparency and computational reproducibility with Nextjournal. With this scholarship, we want to collaborate with authors and support them in creating interactive, computationally reproducible articles that can be rapidly explored and understood.

This scholarship has two goals:

Promote the Creation of Great, Reproducible Content

The first goal aims at creating interesting, data-driven articles that make use of the above features. The topic and content of these articles is entirely up to you and may range from a passion project investigating a social issue to the reconstruction of a canonical, peer-reviewed publication.

We will help you get started on Nextjournal and with implementing your data-driven workflows.

Authoring Tools for Explorable Explanations

Once the computational framework for your project is in place, we want to work with you to make understanding these insights more effective. Specifically, we will help you build authoring tools for creating explorable explanations, a term that is best illustrated in Bret Victor’s essays Ten Brighter Ideas and Explorable Explanations. The idea is to use interactivity for exploring analyses, in order to make complicated insights more tangible and foster data-driven understanding.

We want to help you create models based on concrete use cases (i.e. your article). We will work with you on finding concepts that make your article more explorable and understandable and build the tools to actualize these ideas. Specifically, this could mean Simon helping you out with graphics programming, or getting help from Martin containerizing your environment or Philipp supporting you with building custom UIs.

Selected scholars will receive:

$3,000 awarded to the responsible party. $1,500 will be awarded upon selection of the project and $1,500 upon completion of the project.
Unlimited cloud compute resources, private data access and secrets storage during the performance of the project.
Support from our developers to implement your project using Nextjournal.

How to apply:

Click the help icon in the lower right corner of this page.
Write us a message that includes the words "Nextjournal Competition" and a list of the names and email addresses of the team members that will be involved in the project. You can include a team name too.
Once you receive access from us, create a new article in Nextjournal that outlines your project. This should be no more than 1000 words and should include a rough timeline.
Send us the URL of your article as a help message.
DEADLINE EXTENDED! Submissions will be accepted until midnight on February 25, 2019 in your local time zone.

Scholarship award:

3-5 scholarships will be awarded and will be announced on April 2, 2019
Your project should roughly take 2 months to implement and begins upon receipt of the first installment of the award.

This scholarship is for the creation of digital assets that include data, code, and computational environments created on Nextjournal by the individual or team of individuals that submit the project. Elements from prior work should be cited where appropriate.

There is no limit to the number of authors included in a project, but it is the responsibility of the lead author to take receipt of and to fairly distribute the award according to the contributions of team members.

Questions? Contact: joe@nextjournal.com