Research Software Engineering: Review of a topic clustering problem in the libraries (Steve Meyer)

This talk will discuss how common practices in software engineering like object oriented programming (OOP) and test-driven development (TDD) can be used in a research computing project. In particular this talk will advocate for the ways that practices like OOP and TDD (while not the only programming paradigms) can be used to guide computer programming software development work to contribute to the stability and resilience of a research project codebase, thereby encouraging a wider range of project experimentation. At the UW-Madison Libraries, Steve Meyer and Becky Standard have been working on project to investigate how machine learning computational techniques can be applied to library collections data. Our goal is to develop new ways to define and interact with the topical spaces represented by catalog records using the subject taxonomy widely used by U.S. academic libraries. Using this project with topical clustering at its core as an example case, Steve will discuss how he is using experience with software engineering practices to guide research and development work.

• Writing a code library for encapsulating project assumptions, constraints
• Incorporating a project's own library within a presentation layer, in our case a web application
• How these best practices help manage a polyglot computational environment where our project makes use of:  
• Ruby programming language for our core codebase and the web application framework and text indexing  
• Apache Solr indexing software  
• Web Standards stack within our web app: HTML/CSS/JS/SVG, including use of the d3.js visualization framework  
• Python scripts for experimentation  
• Node.js and Typescript/JavaScript scripts for experimentation

See an participate in Research Software Engineering on campus. The UW Research Software Engineer (UW RSE) community is the place to learn about and share software management related activities related to research. 

UW RSE meets for Storytelling events on the first Tuesday of every month from 10-11am in room 1145 of the Discovery Building. 

Join the UW RSE community for updates and additional community information: https://groups.google.com/a/g-groups.wisc.edu/g/uw-rse-community-of-practice