Flipbooks: A New Tool for Presenting Code Step-by-Step Alongside its Output

• In Event: Teaching Undergraduate Research Methods

Abstract

Social scientists are increasingly expected to document analyses with programmatic workflows --- in other words to use code. Good examples facilitate accomplishing new or unpracticed tasks using code and communicating examples is easier tools like `Jupytr` notebooks and `Rmarkdown` documents, which show code and its resultant output immediately thereafter. But creators using these tools often must choose between big-picture or narrow-focus demonstration; creators tend to either demo a complete code pipeline that accomplishes a realistic task or instead demonstrate a minimal example which makes clear the behavior of a particular function, but how it might be used in a larger project isn't clear. We created Flipbooks to address this problem, allowing the creator to present a full demonstration which accomplishes a real task, and gives the viewer the opportunity to focus on unfamiliar steps. Aligned superimposition of new code and output atop previous code and output makes it easy to identify how each code change triggers changes in output. Additionally, we’ve built a package to help people build their own Flipbooks; the package parses code in a data manipulation or visualization pipeline and then build it back up incrementally.

Author

• Evangeline Mae Reynolds, University of Denver