One thing that stuck out to me from last class’s presentation was the quote: “Future you is your first user.” It’s easy to get lost in the muddle of guidelines and standards, the confusion of what you think you’re supposed to be doing. But imagining yourself coming back in 10, 20 years – or heck, even just a few weeks, and trying to figure out what in the world you were doing makes data management a lot easier to understand. What can you do to make life a little easier for your future self? What- when you’re looking at other’s projects, do you wish existed to explore the core data that went into their work?
Many horror stories somehow involve navigation. Whether a haunted house, a creepy forest, or an abandoned building, horror tends to evoke some fear of the unknown, exemplified by shadowy places where you can easily get lost if you aren’t careful. So what’s a poor, terrified horror protagonist to do? One old reliable strategy is to create a path so you can return the way you came. This is what Hansel and Gretel did by leaving breadcrumbs so they could find their way back after escaping an evil witch who tried to cook and eat them (a fairy tale? yeah, no that is absolutely a horror story).
And leaving that path – including planning in advance how you will leave it – is kind of what data management is about!
Using data management as a way to primarily orient yourself within your project might seem kind of a selfish approach – after all the types of organization methods that instinctively make sense to you won’t always be easily comprehensible to others. But leaving a trail for your future self is just the first step. Once you know that everything is planned, organized and documented so you can jump right back in after a break or distraction, it’s a lot easier to expand from there. If you prefer sharing data on GitHub but a teammate prefers Google Drive, then great, it’s easy enough to copy data to another platform, so long as you make a point to keep all copies of the dataset in sync. If a data dictionary Excel spreadsheet works perfectly as a way for you to make sense of your data, but you’re presenting to a group full of visual learners, then you can create a visual aid. And it will be a lot easier to have a spreadsheet that makes perfect sense to you to pull from when making that visual aid than if you just used the raw dataset. Basically, what I’m saying is that if you start with a data management plan that makes life easier for you, it becomes a lot easier to start making life easier for anyone else who may want to use your data. Because having done the thing that makes it all make sense to you, you’re now coming from a place of understanding, understanding that you can share.
Maybe for you it’s breadcrumbs you leave, for someone else it’s a thread, or markings on trees, or a sequence of landmarks memorized by heart. It doesn’t matter how you learn the route through the scary unknown, because once you learn it, it’s known and significantly less scary, and you can teach it to other people too.
A fun tangent: While refreshing my memory on the breadcrumbs in Hansel and Gretel, I came across this page, which ties the concept to web design: https://www.syntagm.co.uk/design/articles/breadcrumbs.htm. This is something worth keeping in mind if we do end up with multiple pages on the site – ensuring users can easily return to the home page if they end up elsewhere from a search. Fun how sometimes silly metaphors loop back around to being relevant to the original thing that spawned them!
