The Carpentries is a

nonprofit organization A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...

that teaches

software engineering Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining Application software, software applications. It involves applying engineering design process, engineering principl ...

and

data science Data science is an interdisciplinary academic field that uses statistics, scientific computing, scientific methods, processing, scientific visualization, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge from potentially noisy, stru ...

skills to researchers through instructional workshops. The Carpentries is made up of three programs areas: Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry and Library Carpentry. The Carpentries workshops have been run internationally, including workshops at the

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums, Education center, education and Research institute, research centers, created by the Federal government of the United States, U.S. government "for the increase a ...

, the

Australian Research Data Commons The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) is a limited company, formed on 1 July 2018 by combining the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), Nectar (National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources) and Research Data Services (RDS). Its ...

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...

, and in

Antarctica Antarctica () is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean (also known as the Antarctic Ocean), it contains the geographic South Pole. ...

History

Software Carpentry workshops began in 1998 as week-long training courses by Brent Gorda and Greg Wilson. at

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development Laboratory, laboratories of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, United States Department of Energy ...

. The Software Carpentry Foundation was formed in 2014 alongside the sibling foundation, Data Carpentry. These organizations were merged in 2018 to form what is now known as The Carpentries. In 2018, Library Carpentry became the third lesson program of The Carpentries.

Workshops

Carpentries workshops are two-day workshops led by volunteer instructors who have been certified through the organization's training program. Content covered in a standard workshop includes using the command line and an introduction to a programming language such as R or

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (prog ...

. Workshops under the Data Carpentry program focus on specific subject domains, such as life sciences or social sciences. A Software Carpentry workshop is designed as an

active learning Active learning is "a method of learning in which students are actively or experientially involved in the learning process and where there are different levels of active learning, depending on student involvement." states that "students particip ...

and collaborative experience. The lesson content is hands-on with practice following instructors live coding, while helpers are ready to assist students and keep the class pace. Training covers the core skills needed to be productive in a small research team. Tutorials in the lesson alternate with practical exercises, where collaboration is attempted. There is a collaborative document where the learning process is constructed.

Lessons

Stable lessons

All lesson content under The Carpentries curriculum are licensed openly under

Creative Commons license A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and bu ...

s. Before being adopted as an ''official Carpentries lesson'', new lessons go through a series of stages designed to ensure they are sufficiently documented to be teachable by instructors outside of the initial author group. The Carpentries shares ''The Carpentries Community Developed Lessons'' (there are three core topics: the

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

shell, version control with Git, and a programming language (Python or R). Curricula for these lessons in English and Spanish (select lessons only) and also ''Data Carpentry's lessons''.

Community developed lesson

The Carpentries community has a collaborative and open process for lesson development and to sharing teaching materials. Th
Carpentries incubator
contains lessons developed by community members. These lessons follow a life cycle that begins with pre-alpha, where only the concept is offered, and ends with beta, where the lesson is taught in a workshop by instructors other than the authors. There are 4 stages: ''pre-alpha'', ''alpha'', ''beta'', and ''stable''. ''Pre-alpha'' is the draft from the initial lesson idea. ''Alpha''s goal is to collect and incorporate feedback from learners and co-instructor. The two lessons in ''beta stages'' are Reproducible Computational Environments using Containers and Data Harvesting for Agriculture. Carpentries incubator has approximately 30 lessons available in alpha stage, ranging from a spreadsheet to a database through Python for Humanities and

Metagenomics Metagenomics is the study of all genetics, genetic material from all organisms in a particular environment, providing insights into their composition, diversity, and functional potential. Metagenomics has allowed researchers to profile the mic ...

. There is another main way for community members to share lessons material: The CarpentriesLab, which is a repository for high-quality, peer-reviewed, short-format, lessons that use the teaching approach and lesson design from The Carpentries. It is also possible to get peer-review on the content of a lesson by submitting it to The Incubator through Carpentries. The lessons from both Carpentries Incubator and CarpentriesLab can be taught in meetups, classes or as complements to a standard two-day Carpentries workshop.

Other language lessons

The Carpentries community has developed Spanish versions of its core lessons which are the

shell Shell may refer to: Architecture and design * Shell (structure), a thin structure ** Concrete shell, a thin shell of concrete, usually with no interior columns or exterior buttresses Science Biology * Seashell, a hard outer layer of a marine ani ...

, version control with

Git Git () is a distributed version control system that tracks versions of files. It is often used to control source code by programmers who are developing software collaboratively. Design goals of Git include speed, data integrity, and suppor ...

and R as a programming language.

Funding

The Carpentries is fiscally sponsored by Community Initiatives and funded through a combination of memberships, workshop fees, grants and donations. The Carpentries has over 70 member organizations, including the

Software Sustainability Institute The Software Sustainability Institute is a national facility for building better software based in the UK and founded in 2010. The Institute is based at the University of Edinburgh (EPCC formerly Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre) with sites a ...

, the

National Institute of Standards and Technology The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into Outline of p ...

, New Zealand eScience Infrastructure, and Compute Canada. Library Carpentry was seed funded in 2015 by a small grant from the

. In November 2017, the Library Carpentry program received a supplemental

Institute of Museum and Library Services The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is an Independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the United States federal government established in 1996. It is the main source of federal support for librar ...

grant, in partnership with the

California Digital Library The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management ...

, valued at $249,553. In November 2019, the

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is an organization established and owned by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan with an investment of 99 percent of the couple's wealth from their Facebook shares over their lifetim ...

and the

Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is an American foundation established by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore and his wife Betty I. Moore in September 2000 to support scientific discovery, environmental conservation, patient care improvements ...

announced a joint award of $2.65 million for The Carpentries.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Carpentries, The 1998 establishments in California Organizations established in 2014 Non-profit organizations based in California Educational organizations based in the United States Information technology organizations