How Code Notebooks Enable Open Source Research - bellingcat

"The number of open source tools out there is growing rapidly, but technical bars to entry mean they remain inaccessible to many researchers.

GitHub, a platform where developers share and discuss their code, is home to many of these tools. Searching the website for open source investigation tools can appear daunting to the uninitiated — there are more than six thousand results. Beyond this, many more of the platform’s over 300 million other projects, from social media scrapers to AI models, also have a useful application in open source research.

But even many experienced researchers don’t use these tools. A 2022 survey by Bellingcat found that 45 per cent of researchers can’t use these tools, and in total 75 per cent have never used them. The core issue is accessibility: most tools are code scripts and command line interfaces. There’s no user interface to install, no web page to go to. While we encourage researchers to learn the command line and also teach it at our workshops, some tools require setup, debugging, and coding knowledge that limits who can effectively use them.

If you are part of that 45 percent or that 75 percent, there is a way to unlock this world of open source tools for your own research — code Notebooks! These are widely known as Jupyter Notebooks...."