Blog-based research notebook: Personal informatics workbench for high-throughput experimentation

Abstract In this age of information technology, many researchers are still conservative in keeping a log of their activities in paper-based notebooks. This style of log-keeping brings about the situation that our experimental data and their descriptions are recorded separately into hard disks and papers, respectively. Such a data separation is likely to be a serious rate-limiting factor in high-throughput experimentation from the view point of getting feedback on each researcher’s work from what he has done. We propose to utilize a blog (Weblog) as an electronic research notebook and discuss technical requirements for maintaining it, on the basis of the blogging experience for 4 years by one of the authors. We need a user-installed blog server with authentication function for personalization and network infrastructure enabling us to “blog anytime, anywhere”. Although some knowledge-sharing systems have similar electronic notebooks as their front-end, the present blog system is different from these because it stores personal information which is not meant to be shared with others. This blog-based notebook cooperates with these e-notebooks by promoting hyperlinks among their contents, and acts as a personal informatics workbench providing connections to all the resources needed.