Data management and storage
Our discussion today on best methods for data storage and management was extremely helpful and relevant. I have been trying to find a system to organize my backups in a more intentional way, and today provided some really good starting points and ideas. I love that we have unlimited storage on Google Drive through UMaine, and started fully backing up parts of my computer instead of cherry-picking documents to upload as they became relevant. My breakout group also nicely brought up Zotero as a way of organizing and storing papers as you accumulate them over your career. I have used Zotero as a citation manager in the past, but haven’t been as organized with it as I now plan to be.
I also appreciated the overview that Callahan et al. (2017) gave on OTUs and ASVs. I knew the basics of the differences between the two and the debate over them, but this gave a great explanation of the different types of OTUs, the processes by which they are made, and their benefits and detriments. I could sense some of the potential bias that Alex mentioned during the discussion, particularly in that ASVs seemed almost too good to be true. It does seem like a clear choice, but I am usually hesitant when an idea is presented as fixing all or most of the previous issues in a method. They briefly explain near the end of the paper that ASVs will not be a catch-all solution, but I would be curious to see more discussion on this.