Jacquard

We believe one of the most important capabilities in creative tools is version control: helping people collaborate, review suggestions, and see what’s changed, in both synchronous and asynchronous editing situations. In our 2023 project Upwelling we prototyped “draft layers” for asynchronous collaborative writing. Next, Patchwork built on that work to explore “universal version control”: powerful diffing and branching tools built not just for writing, but also drawings, spreadsheets, and other kinds of media.

In summer 2024, Paul Sonnentag and Geoffrey Litt teamed up with Josh Horowitz to explore universal version control in a new domain: scientific research papers.

We’ve heard from scientists in a variety of fields that their digital tools make it cumbersome to collaborate on data analyses and writing papers. One problem is that limited version control makes it difficult to review collaborators’ edits. Another issue is that writing and data analysis are managed in separate environments, which leads to tedious manual work stitching together data across tools.

On this project, we’re prototyping Jacquard: a collaborative environment for writing empirical research papers. The goal is to free up researchers to focus more on their core work of science and communication, and less on tedious bookkeeping. (The name “Jacquard” comes from the automated loom that was an important step in the history of computing.)

For more details on the demo and our goals for the project, check out the Jacquard lab notebook, where we’ll post further updates. And if you’re a scientist who works with data and struggles with collaboration, we’d love to hear from you.