I have to confess that this week got away from me, and I ended up being much busier with my day job and thwarted my plans to steam company time and join Sasha’s skill share session, a GitHub and VSCode walkthrough that would prove foundational to our data curation efforts further down the line. But Sasha was generous enough to record the session and include the links into our shared documents, so I am all set to walk myself through the workshop and touch base with questions for her next week. All of this to say the first data-management technique I need to apply to everything I do, is keeping a better calendar!

All jokes aside, from some creative coding classes and working in an editorial context where a piece of writing goes through as many as four versions, each of them shared among multiple parties and requiring strict version control, I had picked up on a few tricks over time: Smarter file naming conventions, copies spread out across multiple sources and locations, documentation (README’s especially), version control. But Steve Zweibel’s Research Data Management presentation was so useful I saved the link to all my workspaces. Just having access to the language of data management — types of research data (by origin or form), data life cycle, FAIR principles, etc. — gave some purpose and unification to what have long been a set of haphazard practices I use to work.

When I think about data degradation, I am more likely to think about link rot or bit rot, the actual deterioration and degradation of the mechanisms of saving information. But Michener’s “Data Entropy” diagram charts how distance from data’s original context and the people who created it are factors that data management is meant to mitigate. We take pictures, keep scrapbooks, memento boxes, travel souvenirs, and ask our elders to rehash the same stories so we can keep that immediacy that binds us to source of information. Like links, bits, and pictures, any form of data collection is subject to deterioration. So in truth, link rot is not too different from dry rot and in both cases, “future you is your first user.”