Scripting is really important and it's the basic idea of writing everything down.
Back in the old days you might have written down,
you know, things down on paper or in lab notebooks.
But now that we have more sophisticated computers and we can
program them, we write things down as pr, as scripts or programs.
So I mean, if you, as, just by way of analogy.
You think about you think about a great symphony or a great piece of music.
You think of if
you, if you imagine just hearing the melody of a piece of music, okay?
That's very interesting, it's also can be very beautiful.
But often, if you look at a symphony, there's a whole orchestra.
There's a whole set of musicians that are kind of backing up the melody.
And doing a lot of work and all that work is really important and contributes to
the texture, contributes to the, the kind of
feel of the whole piece of music, right?
So if you been out and if you were just hear
a symphony it probably would be difficult for you to reproduce that
sound even if you could hire your
own orchestra because you wouldn't know where all
the notes were, what all the, all the
different instruments were playing at any given time.
That even if you heard it a few times,
you saw, probably still wouldn't be able to do it.
And you, in particular you would definitely not be able to
reproduce that sound if you were to only hear the melody, right?
So, if you think about the presentation of of an
analysis or of your research [COUGH] the presentation is really
kind of like, like hearing the melody alone, right?
The melody is really nice, it's really important.
But it's, there's all this supporting material
that, that's going on behind the scenes.
All the, the analyses that you did, all the exploratory work,
all of the, kind of, dead ends that you went down, all the
decisions that you made in your analysis, which are not presented in
your, kind of, final presentation, whether it's a paper or a oral presentation.
But they're all very important.
So those are the supporting
players, all right?
So just like in music in research we need a way to
kind of write down everything that we did, everything that's going on right?
So in music this is typically called the score, right?
So the score is, is, is a way to kind of write
down in musical notation all the different things that are being played.
All the different things that are going on.
All the notes, all the rhythms.
All the timings, all the instruments, everything.
And so someone can look at the score and
say okay, well I need to put together all these things and
I, every- ever- people have to play at different times and different locations.
And so it's a way to, for you to
reproduce a piece of music as accurately as possible.
And, and musicians have kind of, have come, have
agreed upon a standard way to write down music.
And a standard notation for doing that.
And so this course is essentially about, you
know, defining and developing the notation of specifying
a re, a research project or a data analysis.
Right, so what is the, how do we write down what the what are the
things that we did, how did we talk about exactly what was analyzed, what was done.
And so the way that we do that essentially is through scripting, right?
We write down computer programs.
We talk, we we give instructions to the computer and tell it what
to do at any, at any given time with what type of data.
And so the main rule
for anything you in data analysis is to write a script.
And the more you can do that and the less you can kind of do things by, on
your own, by hand without writing it down, the
better and the more reproducible your work will be.
So this, so these computer programs, these scripts that we write.
These are like the score for your data analysis.
They tell someone else who's trying to reproduce
your work exactly what happened and what to do.