By Maxine Whitfield
I still get emails from my MSc supervisor, who I have nothing but the utmost respect for, but whose name in my inbox is usually accompanied by a heart-quickening, “fight or flight” response, and feelings of complete terror.
Until recently, we were preparing manuscripts for publication (thankfully they're all published now), and he usually had a question about how I analysed my data. Despite the fact that I wrapped up the final edits on my dissertation a mere year and a half ago, it often took me a full day of frantic searching in documents scattered to the furthest corners of my laptop, under filenames such as “dissertation final”; “dissertation REALLY final” and “dissertation December 2015 kill me now”, before I could answer his simple question. I spent hours poring through spreadsheets of data. Did I end up including those outliers in the mixed model? I need to hunt down the R file from that analysis… What the heck would I have named it?
I still get emails from my MSc supervisor, who I have nothing but the utmost respect for, but whose name in my inbox is usually accompanied by a heart-quickening, “fight or flight” response, and feelings of complete terror.
Until recently, we were preparing manuscripts for publication (thankfully they're all published now), and he usually had a question about how I analysed my data. Despite the fact that I wrapped up the final edits on my dissertation a mere year and a half ago, it often took me a full day of frantic searching in documents scattered to the furthest corners of my laptop, under filenames such as “dissertation final”; “dissertation REALLY final” and “dissertation December 2015 kill me now”, before I could answer his simple question. I spent hours poring through spreadsheets of data. Did I end up including those outliers in the mixed model? I need to hunt down the R file from that analysis… What the heck would I have named it?
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| My naming system for folders and files left much to be desired. I shared this Dropbox folder with my supervisor. It must have terrified him. |
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| I had some kind of hunch about the relationship between expected and observed metabolic rates, and spent a crazy afternoon excitedly exploring my data. Yikes. A couple of years down the line and I honestly have no clue what is going on in this spreadsheet. |
The point I am trying to make here,
is that as a naïve, happy-go-lucky honours graduate entering my Master's degree, I had absolutely no idea just how much data collection, exploration, analysis and writing I would
do in the next couple of years, and I had even less of an idea of how to go
about managing it all. The point of this blog series, therefore, is to arm the
bright-eyed, bushy-tailed future postgrads who read it with the tools to manage
their data effectively, so that when publishing their incredible results, they
can coolly respond to any co-author’s questions with negligible blood-shed.
DataONE, an online repository for worldwide ecological and environmental data, has a fantastic set of tutorials on the various aspects of data management. For each of these blog posts, I'll put a link up to their page of tutorials and exercises, and suggest which ones correspond to the topics I'm discussing in the post. See Lesson 01 here.
DataONE, an online repository for worldwide ecological and environmental data, has a fantastic set of tutorials on the various aspects of data management. For each of these blog posts, I'll put a link up to their page of tutorials and exercises, and suggest which ones correspond to the topics I'm discussing in the post. See Lesson 01 here.
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