Data Management Prompts
How are you feeling about your data?
Here are a few prompts to help you start thinking about how you manage your data and where there are potential challenges. These prompts should help you to decide where to start and we encourage you to discuss them with the entire team
Collecting
- Do you collect Field or/and Lab data?
- What is your Research Lab’s typical process for data collection? Frequency, events-based or continuous monitoring?
- Do you have a QA/QC workflow/strategy in place (documented or not)?
- Do you have file naming conventions in place (documented or not)?
Managing
- What are your lab challenges related to accessing, manipulating and/or moving data?
- What are your lab needs, pain points, or where do you feel time is wasted related to ensuring future use of data by yourself or others?
- What are your main security or data loss concerns related to your data?
- What are your data that might contain sensitive information (geolocation, human subjects, …) and thus need special handling?
- What are your current backup strategies?
Analyzing
- What type of analysis is conducted on your data?
- What is the unit of analysis for your projects? (individual, community, space, time…)?
- Is it mostly done using a scripting language (R, Python)?
- What is the saturation level and how many events/data points are enough to come to a conclusion?
- Is there a mix of qualitative and quantitative analysis?
