Studio 11: Reproduce and package
This studio is part of a book in active development and has not yet been through the author’s review. Content may change as the review advances.
What you can defend when you leave. Prove that someone who is not you can obtain your result from your materials.
The milestone ahead
Research that only runs on your machine, with you present, is testimony rather than evidence. This milestone proves that someone who is not you can obtain your result from your materials alone: a cold run, a stranger’s run (or, working alone, its honestly labeled solo proxy), and a package that carries data access, code, environment, documentation, and licence. It is the boundary between work you finished and work others can build on.
This studio closes with Milestone 11: Your reproducible package, a short chapter of its own after the lessons. What it asks you to produce. An independent cold-run record and a reusable research package. Working alone, the record is a clean-environment rerun labeled “solo proxy; external cold run pending” — the label, and the honesty it enforces, are part of the artifact.
Milestone 12 decides whether the packaged work is ready to leave your hands, and what the next cycle should ask. The milestone chapter keeps the working details: the practice steps, the versioned record, and how the artifact is assessed.
The lessons in this studio
Read them in order, working each lesson’s It is your turn as you go. Each one builds a piece of Milestone 11; beside each lesson is the piece it hands you.
- Lesson 36 — Replication and Reproduction: your cold reproduction record: every number re-run from the top, one undisclosed choice varied, and missingness classified before any filling.
- Lesson 37 — Open and Reusable Research Packages: your research capsule: the runnable notebook, the data-provenance note with its terms of use, the fixed seed, the decision log, your AI-use ledger, the environment record, the README, and a cold rerun in a second environment.
When the last lesson closes, the milestone chapter is next. Nothing you write in a lesson is busywork: every piece above is on the milestone’s checklist.