Our ISB Education Officer, Dario Cazzola, has been scouting biomechanical resources and came across the Awesome Biomechanics resource list created by Luca Modenese (Imperial College London). You can find an introductory video from Dario, with a short tutorial of the site given by Luca at the link below, and an interview extract explaining the motivations behing the list and how you might be able to help in keeping it up to date -
Awesome Biomechanics Interview with Luca Modenese
How on Earth did you decide to come up with this great idea?
I cannot say it was my original idea. “Awesome lists” are actually relatively common on GitHub and other open source communities, especially in fields rapidly evolving like deep learning or machine learning. They are free, open source lists meant to help others staying updated with new publications and online resources. I simply thought something like that was missing in biomechanics and decided to start one.
How long did it take to you to create it and what’s the actual weekly commitment you put into it?
It took few days to write the list, which is just a text document in Markdown format, and organise it. Actually, it helped me to collect old notes and finally close all those Chrome tabs I leave open every time I see something interesting and plan to check it later.
Since I use GitHub almost on a daily basis and I like trying new software and datasets when they become available, currently the maintenance effort is very low.
Were there many resources added to the list in 2020?
Because of the pandemic and remote teaching, this year there have been several excellent lectures, courses and conferences made publicly available. I have tried to collect some of those as well.
It is an open repo and people can contribute - is this happening? How often do people send you update?
The list is public for anyone to consult and, if they want, to contribute. So far, several people starred the list but only few contributed and I think this could be because Git can be intimidating for biomechanists, while once you approach it is actually very straightforward to use.
Are you planning to keep it on GitHub?
Yes, the list is a public domain document under a Creative Common Public license and I plan to keep it that way.
What’s next?
I will keep maintaining the list and I hope that seeing what it freely available will make people more inclined towards sharing their datasets, resources and knowledge. I think that only good things can come from it. At the lowest level, like this list of resources, sharing saves time to students or researchers. At a higher level, an open science approach can truly contribute to the advancement of the field, projects like OpenSim or the Biomechanical Toolkit (BTK) are perfect examples of this!