What happened to the book? Updates on Human Centered Data Science
One of our first Book Sprints of 2020 – and still onsite – was a very interesting project with the University of Washington in Seattle: a small team of professors gathered to write a handbook about Human Centered Data Science, directed to New Data Science students.
The hard-working team of authors after the conclusion of the Book Sprint.
We always advise the organisers that 5 should be the minimum number of participants, and still that will depend on the amount of content they wish to produce during the Book Sprint. In this case, the 5 authors worked really hard to cover the desired content and reach the amount of words that would result in a comprehensive book for this topic.
The five-day onsite Book Sprint generated a first draft of the handbook. On August 2020 we reached out to the organiser, Prof. Cecilia Aragon – computer scientist, professor, and champion aerobatic pilot! – to give us some feedback and updates on what happened to the book:
I am so grateful we got our Book Sprint in under the wire. All is going well and we are very happy with the Book Sprint for helping us accomplish our goal of collaboratively writing a first draft of our book.
Our manuscript is now with the publisher. We expect review comments shortly, and then a revised version will be due later this Fall. We’ve finished a close-to-final draft of the book and are doing proofreading and incorporating our case studies. The final manuscript is due to MIT Press for peer review, and the book will be released in 2021.
We heard from participant Prof. Gina Neff that the book was recently handed over to the publisher MIT Press! After years facilitating books on various areas, we became aware that academic books take more time with editing after the Book Sprint takes place. That is surely something to consider when planning, particularly when the goal is to publish it. In Gina’s words:
We are huge fans! Our finalised book has just been delivered to MIT Press with a huge shout out to Book Sprints in the acknowledgements. I have recommended Book Sprints to many colleagues and will continue to do so!
We are surely pleased with the updates of this Book Sprint, and looking forward to the book’s publication.