Introduction

Data Management

Figure 1

A comic strip titled 'The four stages of data loss' and subtitled 'dealing with accidental deletion of months of hard-earned data' by PhD Comics. It's based on the common theory of five stages of grief. The first panel is labelled 'stage 1: denial' and shows a man sitting behind a computer. A thought bubble above his head reads 'I did not just erase all my data. I surely made a back-up somewhere'. The second panel is labelled 'stage 2: anger' and shows the man shaking his computer. A speech bubble above his head shows he is shouting 'you stupid piece of crap! Where's my data?!'. The third panel is labelled 'stage 3: depression'. It shows the man crying, the broken computer beside him. He thinks 'Why? Why me?'. The fourth and final panel is labelled 'stage 4: acceptance'. It shows the man coming to terms with what has happened. He says 'I'm never going to graduate'.
Source: PHD Comics. “Four stages of data loss”

Figure 2

Which of the table layouts is analysis friendly? Discuss. Two tables of data appear side-by-side. The table on the left has columns named site, 1999, and 2000. The table on the right has columns named site, year, and cases.

Code and Software

Figure 1

A tweet from Neil Ferguson, posted on March 22nd 2020. It reads 'I'm conscious that lots of people would like to see and run the pandemic simulation code we are using to model control measures against COVID-19. To explain the background — I wrote the code (thousands of lines on undocumented C) 13 plus years ago to model flu pandemics…'

Collaboration

Figure 1

Microsoft Teams ‘Tasks’. Teams now lets you add a ‘Tasks’ app/tab to a team space, which then lets create a to-do list, assign tasks to people, and lets you track and view the tasks in various ways. An example of Teams Tasks list view

Figure 2

An example of a Jira Kanban board A Kanban board example, from Jira’s website.

Figure 3

An example of a Jira Backlog A “backlog” view example, from Jira’s website.

Project Organization

Keeping Track of Changes

Figure 1

A comic strip titled "final.doc" by PhD Comics. The first panel shows a student saving a document on their computer and naming the file "final.doc". The second panel shows their professor editing the document on a printed piece of paper. The third panel shows the student making the edits and naming the new document "final_rev2.doc". The fourth to ninth panels go back and forth between the professor and the student, with increasingly complex file names. By the end the student is exasperated and hitting their head on their computer screen.
Source: PhD Comics. “notFinal.doc”

Manuscripts

What To Do Next

Agile