As well as offering digital application shelves, should libraries offer, or act as instituional sponsors of, digital workbenches?

I’ve previously blogged about things like SageMathCloud, and application based learning environment, and the IBM Data Scientist Workbench, and today came across another example: DHBox, CUNY’s digital humanities lab in the cloud (wiki), which looks like it may have been part of a Masters project?

If you select the demo option, a lab context is spawned for you, and provides access to a range of tools: staples, such as RStudio and Jupyter notebooks, a Linux terminal, and several website creation tools: Brackets, Omeka and WordPress (though the latter two didn’t work for me).

(The toolbar menu reminded me of Stringle / DockLE 😉

There’s also a file browser, which provides a common space for organising – and uploading – your own files. Files created in one application are saved to the shared file area and available for use on other applications.

The applications are being a (demo) password authentication scheme, which makes me wonder if persistent accounts are in the project timeline?

Once inside the application, you have full control over it. If you need additional packages in RStudio, for example, then just install them:

They work, too!

On the Jupyter notebook front, you get access to Python3 and R kernels:

In passing, I notice that RStudio’s RMarkdown now demonstrates some notebook like activity, demonstrating the convergence between document formats such as Rmd (and ipymd) and notebook style UIs [video].

Code for running your own DHBox installation is available on Github (DH-Box/dhbox), though I haven’t had a chance to give it a try yet. One thing it’d be nice to see is a simple tutorial showing how to add in another tool of your own (OpenRefine, for example?) If I get a chance to play with this – and can get it running – I’ll try to see if I can figure out such an example.

It also reminded me that I need to play with my own install of tmpnb, not least because of  the claim that “tmpnb can run any Docker container”.  Which means I should be able to set up my own tmpRStudio, or tmpOpenRefine environment?

If visionary C. Titus Brown gets his way with a pitched for MyBinder hackathon, that might extend that project’s support for additional data science applications such as RStudio, as well as generalising the infrastructure on which myBinder can run. Such as Reclaimed personal hosting environments, perhaps?!;-)

That such combinations are now popping up all over the web makes me think that they’ll be a commodity service anytime soon. I’d be happy to argue this sort of thing could be used to support a “technology enhanced learning environment”, as well as extending naturally into“technology enhanced research environments”, but from what I can tell, TEL means learning analytics and not practical digital tools used to develop digital skills? (You could probably track the hell of of people using such environments if you wanted to, though I still don’t see what benefits are supposed to accrue from such activity?)

It also means I need to start looking out for a new emerging trend to follow, not least because data2text is already being commoditised at the toy/play entry level. And it won’t be VR. (Pound to a penny the Second Life hipster, hypster, shysters will be chasing that. Any VR campuses out there yet?!) I’d like to think we might see inroads being made into AR, but suspect that too will always be niche, outside certain industry and marketing applications. So… hmmm… Allotments… that’s where the action’ll be… and not in a tech sense…