Abducted by aliens? 🛸 Building Sustainable File, Folder & Documentation Workflows
You arrive at work to see your project’s primary investigator/research coordinator/key graduate student disappearing into a UFO’s buzzing blue beam; with all their project knowledge and disconnected laptop gone forever…or at least til the aliens return them home. While an alien abduction is unlikely to strike your research team, life happens: research coordinators get hired into roles at another university, graduate students return home, PIs go on research leave or get sick unexpectedly and need to step back. Clearly writing out research processes, clear file and folder workflows, organized data storage systems, and more are excellent research practices to make sure everyone is on the same page and your research project is resilient to change. It can also help keep qualitative coding and variables or units of measurement in quantitative projects consistent across multiple researchers. Even if you’re going solo as a graduate student, documenting your data and keeping a good research log will help you unpack what you did when it comes time to write up your project.
After this one-hour crash course in organization and documentation, participants will be able to:
- Create quality file names from bad ones
- Design folder structures that make sense for their project
- Identify types of documentation and locate templates and resources to help them create their own
- Transfer knowledge of storage workflows into their own projects
No prior knowledge is required! This session is designed for researchers who want to think through their documentation and workflows; from graduate students working alone to tenured faculty with a huge research team. Undergraduate students interested in future research might also find it interesting.
Workshop Preparation
Think through your own documentation issues and bring your own use cases to discuss in our final 15 minutes!
Facilitator Bio
Danica Evering is a Research Data Management Specialist grounded in curiosity and a deep commitment to ethics. Danica is available to help students, postdocs, faculty, and staff with RDM through the data lifecycle—Data Management Plans, storage and backup, data security, data sharing. With an MA in Media Studies, Danica fosters active interest in RDM across disciplines, with a knack for engaging researchers who might not even realize they have data to manage. Outside of work they sing in a choir, play PC games, maintain an art writing practice, grow a garden, contribute Wikipedia articles, and run.Â
Isaac Pratt (he/him) is a research scientist by training and has a PhD in Anatomy & Cell Biology. He leverages nearly a decade of interdisciplinary research experience to help support students, staff, and faculty. His expertise lies in questions surrounding data storage, security, planning, archival, and sharing. Isaac also provides support and curation services for McMaster Dataverse. His other interests include reproducible research methods, open science, and data science.
Workshop Slides
Coming soon.