Authors : Mariannig Le Béchec, Célya Gruson Daniel, Clémence Lascombes, Émilien Schultz
Notebooks are now commonly used in digital research practices. Despite their increasing ubiquity, the characteristics, roles, and uses associated with notebooks have seldom been studied from a social science perspective.
In this article, we present an overview of the available empirical work on notebooks in order to describe existing practices, typologies crafted to grasp their diversity, and their limitations when used in data analysis workflows.
Following this review, which highlights a focus of studies on interactive computational notebooks specifically within data science rather than research practices in academic contexts, we discuss the role of notebooks as a vector and lever for the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles associated with open science.