Starting an awesome list for scientific resources

In October 2024 I attended a workshop on speeding up the development of useful agent-based land use models. This was a great opportunity for me to engage in a research field that overlaps my own but is still very different. One of the outcomes of the workshop was that we decided to try and compile a collection of useful educational resources for researchers and students working on the topic.

I proposed that we do this in the form of an Awesome List, which in case you are not familiar is a curated list of resources on a specific topic, typically hosted on GitHub. The nice thing about this format is that it is easy to contribute to, and anyone can add resources they find useful. But at the same time the drawback is that the list is presented as the README section of the Github repository which is not so accessible for those not familiar with the service.

To get around this and display the list in a nicer format, I made an accompanying Quarto webpage for it, hosted through Github pages. But I didn’t want it to be a chore to maintain so I wrote an R script that splits the repo’s README.md file into sections and writes the contents to individual Quarto .qmd files for different types of content that are then brought together as a single page. This script is run automatically as a Github action every time there is a push to main branch of the repo so the webpage is kept up to date.

The list itself is still a work in progress but the repo can be viewed here: https://github.com/awesome-ABM-LU/awesome-ABM-LU and the webpage here: https://awesome-abm-lu.github.io/awesome-ABM-LU/