By Laura Hobbs & Allen Pope, UK Polar Network 

On the 17th September 2013, the UK Polar Network hosted a Software and Polar Research workshop at the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge. The workshop was sponsored by the Institue. Preceding the UK Arctic Sciences 2013 conference, this one day event was designed to introduce new software to early career Polar Scientists whilst also discussing how software that is already used can be developed to increase its possibilities and facilitate better science.

The workshop started with some “Lightning Presentations” from each of the 16 participants. The talks focused on to the software that each of us use, and the types of the data that we use it to interpret. The software introduced was varied, from Microsoft Excel to custom designed software such as Avoplot (to run in Python).

Aleksandra Pawlik introduced the Software Sustainability Institute including the Fellowship Programme and the Collaborations Workshop 2014.

Other speakers in the workshop included Dr. Gareth Rees who introduced the use of free software – and more importantly, is it any good? (The answer? Yes!) Dr. Roisin Moriarty and Dr. Ian Rutt shared their experiences of sharing information within the scientific community, data and coding respectively, and the benefits it can lead to in terms of developing code on a team basis and collaborations emerging due to your data being used in ways it would not have been realised before.

The final section of the day allowed Dr. Jon Blower to present on the visualization of environmental data (with some very imaginative methods) and Dr. Doug McNeall on the presentation of data. Some great tips on the use of colour in graphs and the use of stretching in axis to make the data most appropriate are available on Better Figures blog. There are also "Top tips on software for data visualisation" by Jon Blower on the Institute's blog.

The workshop showed that even within the same domain and research scope there is a variety of needs related to research software and workshops like this one are an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas.