6 Cover Page: Data Staging with stagecoach
A guide to staging data with the stagecoach tool
Adapted from the Golden Planetary Health Lab Handbook’s Data Staging Guide, this page provides a guide to data staging using the stagecoach tool.
This is an example of a very simple manual that can live in your home dir, that you can quickly break out and use for every project you need to stage data for. Just change the variables and execute the notebooks again. Or, you can use it as many times as is necessary before you memorize the workflow…
Which is one of the intended goals of manuals: to help you learn a workflow by doing it, and if you do it enough times, then you can do it without the manual.
Data staging is the process of preparing and organizing data for analysis. In the Golden Lab, we use a tool called stagecoach to help with this process. stagecoach allows users to request access to datasets using a digital manifest. In doing so, it ensures that the exact resources you request for your project are made available to you in a computationally reproducible manner, reducing the risk of errors and missing steps.
This manual instructs you on how to use stagecoach to stage data for your project. It is designed to be flexible enough to be used by other people and projects, but still reproducible and robust enough to ensure you don’t have to look up or copy-paste the same steps over and over again. This is a great scenario for a simple operator’s manual.