This repository documents a one year study of Github software repositories in aggregate. We aimed to study how repositories compose a field of devices interacting with each other through processes of imitation, incorporation, and citation. The idea of 'metacommunities' was to understand the relations between the many, many repositories on Github in terms of a community ecology metaphor.
This preliminary release of some of the publications, data analysis, scripts, secondary data and figures from the research does not comprise a polished product. It does however provide, via the archival features of Github and git itself a reasonably comprehensive record of the work done on the project up to the release date (11 November 2014). Later releases of the project will contain further publications, reports and data analyses.
It is based in Sociology at Lancaster University (UK), led by Adrian Mackenzie. Co-investigators are Matthew Fuller (Goldsmiths, London) and Andrew Goffey (Nottingham). Richard Mills and Stu Sharples were the postdoctoral researchers working on the project.
The project was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council under its 2013 'Google and Data Analytics' funding scheme.
The main components of the repository are:
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Publications - manuscripts in process of publication as well as papers and presentations written for conferences and workshops
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Data Analysis -- scripts, sample and secondary data, and figures or plots produced in the course of the work. These range across a number of different foci including:
The blog for the project is http://metacommunitiesofcode.org/.
The DOI for this repository (for use in citations in academic articles) is
