Preserving Workflow Reproducibility: The RePlay-DH Client as a Tool for Process Documentation

Abstract

In this paper we present a software tool for elicitation and management of process metadata. It follows our previously published design idea of an assistant for researchers that aims at minimizing the additional effort required for producing a sustainable workflow documentation. With the ever-growing number of linguistic resources available, it also becomes increasingly important to provide proper documentation to make them comparable and to allow meaningful evaluations for specific use cases. The often prevailing practice of post hoc documentation of resource generation or research processes bears the risk of information loss. Not only does detailed documentation of a process aid in achieving reproducibility, it also increases usefulness of the documented work for others as a cornerstone of good scientific practice. Time pressure together with the lack of simple documentation methods leads to workflow documentation in practice being an arduous and often neglected task. Our tool ensures a clean documentation for common workflows in natural language processing and digital humanities. Additionally, it can easily be integrated into existing institutional infrastructures.

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