Investigating and Archiving the Scholarly Git Experience

<h3>Project Overview</h3>

<p>This project contains the data that underlies the behavioral study done as a part of Investigating & Archiving the Scholarly Git Experience (IASGE), a funded project thanks to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. IASGE addresses the need to investigate how academics are using Git hosting platforms, how they can be adapted to academic needs, and how the scholarship hosted on them can be archived. The results of this project aim to inform the that scholarship on Git hosting platforms move from a phase where they are highly active and collaborative, to a state where they are stable, permanently citable, and under active, professional preservation.</p>
<p>This half of the IASGE project, the behavioral study, is a three-part, mixed methods empirical approach to understand the scholarly users of Git and Git hosting platforms (GHP) whose use patterns vary from beginner to advanced. Methods employed include focus group sessions, a survey, and interviews. The data used include, but are not limited to, user profiles, frequency of feature use, and common practices, all which inform how librarians can support scholars in sustainable and long-term research. Through focus groups, a survey, and interviews, the study considers two groups of scholars: those who actively use Git to conduct their research within the academy, and those who are aware of Git but have not fully adopted it into their workflow in a standardized way. While each scholar may have varying reasons and degrees to which they include Git throughout their workflows, they all belong to the community of scholars who have the potential to utilize the power of Git to optimize their research and scholarship output.</p>