How about recording videos of the lab? People trying to reproduce the experiment can just sift through the video. That may be tedious but it's far better than nothing.
Just a little metadata would help: Experiment A, Phase N, Day X
Video and photographic evidence can play a big role and when we have the extra bandwidth to process such a dataset. Right now we barely have time to do the experiments, much less 'watch tape' to see how we did (maybe if scientists were paid like professional sports players...). In an ideal world we would be collecting a much data as we possibly could about the whole state of the universe surrounding the 'controlled' experiment. That said video and photographs are very bad a communicating important parameters in an efficient way. Think about how hard it is to get information out of a youtube video if you need something like a part number. Photos do better, but if you need to copy and paste out of a photo we will need a bit more heavy lifting to translate that into some actionable format (eg ASCII).
I didn't mean record it to use the data in your analysis, but record it to preserve the methods for others. If they have trouble getting part of the experiment to work, they can pull up the video and see how you did it (at least to a degree; I'm not expecting 360 video. You can't possible record in text everything a video could capture.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience in this discussion, by the way. It's what makes HN great.
Ah, yes, things like JOVE [0] are definitely useful but they don't seem to scale to the sheer number of protocols that need to be documented (eg a single JOVE publication is exceedingly expensive). I have also heard from people who have tried to record video of themselves doing a protocol is that it is very hard to make them understandable for someone else. That said if the 'viewer' is highly motivated videos of any quality could be invaluable. Sometimes it is just better to buy the plane tickets and go directly to the lab of the person who can teach you (if they are still around).
> if the 'viewer' is highly motivated videos of any quality could be invaluable
That's what I meant. Just stick some cameras in the ceiling (or wherever is best) and capture what you can. It seems cheap and better than nothing, but I know nothing about biological research.
Just a little metadata would help: Experiment A, Phase N, Day X