Documentation and Replicability in the NIME Community

In this paper, we discuss the importance of replicability in Digital Musical Instrument (DMI) design and the NIME community. Replication enables us to: create new artifacts based on existing ones, experiment DMIs in different contexts and cultures, and validate obtained results from evaluations. We investigate how the papers present artifact documentation and source code by analyzing the NIME proceedings from 2018, 2019, and 2020. We argue that the presence and the quality of documentation are good indicators of replicability and can be beneficial for the NIME community. Finally, we discuss the importance of documentation for replication, propose a call to action towards more replicable projects, and present a practical guide informing future steps toward replicability in the NIME community.