Afternoon Coffee

Estimated time: 0 minutes

Reflection exercise

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Over break, reflect on and discuss the following:

• Think about existing data you are working with. Are the data split up into multiple files? How are the files named and organized? Would you be able to efficiently process these files using a for loop?
• If you are creating a new data set, what file naming and data organization practices would help you and your collaborators analyze and interpret your data now and in five or ten years?

Here are some guides for file naming and data collection that we’ve found. Let us know if you have additional resources you’d like to share!

• https://carpentries-lab.github.io/good-enough-practices/05-project_organization.html
• https://datamanagement.hms.harvard.edu/plan-design/file-naming-conventions
• https://guides.library.stanford.edu/data-best-practices
• https://book.the-turing-way.org/reproducible-research/rdm/rdm-storage/