Bench Press

Cameron Neylon wrote a great post about the difference between recording and presenting data in an online lab notebook. The whole post provides a great analysis of the differences he sees between LaBLog, the UsefulChem wiki and the basic philosophies behind their use.

The end of Cameron’s post really got me thinking about the possibilities that a “presentation layer” could have in an online lab notebook. I envision a presentation layer that leverages recent innovations in webapp technology to automatically generate a flowchart-like view of all posts/data/experiments contained within one’s notebook. This graphic would be interactive, customizable, and could be coupled with methodology excerpts in order to provide a complete view of experiments over time.

Much like the grouping of messages by conversation in Gmail provides an innovative and more intuitive organization of e-mail, I feel that a graphic of this sort would be an intuitive manner to deal with the somewhat fragmented nature of online lab notebooks without too much editing after the fact. It would make it easy to visualize branches in experimental thought or dead ends. While also consolidating experiments for viewing by people with access to your online notebook. Ideally providing an accurate representation of work flow and thought process.

I suspect coding something like this wouldn’t be the simplest task and there’s definitely a fair amount of kinks that I’m sure would have to be worked out. Regardless I’m excited to be able to think about the possibilities that online lab notebooks will bring to science over the coming years.