 Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Pixel Data Scapes. I'm your host, Hannah Gunderman, and I'm a research data management consultant at CMU Libraries. I'm really excited by my role here at the libraries, which is all about encouraging and educating on data management principles. I'm also a gamer and love to spend my free time playing video games. And Pixel Data Scapes is a place where I can combine these two things. There are so many lessons we can learn about data management from video games, and today I'm going to be talking about what Entitled Goose Game can teach us about writing data management plans. So sit back, relax, and let's dive in. Before we talk about Untitled Goose Game, we're going to talk about data management and data management plans. Now, if you came here specifically to learn about Untitled Goose Game, bear with me, as by the end I might have you feeling excited about not only this game, but also data management. As always, I like to start off by defining what data management is. I want you to think about all the processes you might use to organize things in your day-to-day life, like your spice rack, your bathroom cabinet, your bookshelf, your record collection, etc. Data management is essentially applying these principles of organization to the data that you are producing and using in your research, and making sure that this data is organized, described well, and usable in the future not only for yourself but other people who might reuse your data. Now, a big part of data management is creating a data management plan for your research. These are usually short documents, roughly two pages, that outline how you will essentially take care of your data throughout your project, sort of like a love letter to your data. Dear data, I promise to keep you stored in a secure location with regular backups. I will use a good filenaming scheme to make sure that nobody misrepresents you or loses you. I promise to take the time to fully describe you and all of your unique characteristics as you grow and change throughout this research project. Data management plans usually contain several key questions, including what data will be generated in this project, who will be responsible for the data at each stage, how will data sets need to be connected, what software and formats will be used, what information about the data will need to be captured so that others can understand it, where should the data be stored and who should have access to it, how should the data be organized and named, and how will the data be published or archived at the end of the project? I love the data management plan. It's a great way to set yourself up for an organized research process, and as much as I love data management plans, I also really love video games, and one of my favorite games of recent has been Untitled Goose Game. In Untitled Goose Game, you were playing as a goose who was messing around this little English village, stealing people's lunch, their shoes, and generally wreaking havoc on everything. It's quite amazing. Playing it brings about all of these delicious feelings of power and corruption, and, you know, that's not really the topic of this video, but as I was playing through Untitled Goose Game the first time, I started to pick up on several elements of the game that reminded me of that process of writing data management plans. So, this episode of Pixel Datascapes focuses on the lessons we can learn from Untitled Goose Game when it comes to writing data management plans. The first lesson is, know what your goals are. The village goose knows that his ultimate goal is to cause destruction and mayhem for the unsuspecting resonance of this village, and he came prepared. There is an additional goal in the game, but I'm not going to talk about that until later in the video in warning it is a spoiler. Using his list of various tasks to inflict emotional harm and inconvenience on the villagers, the player effectively guides the goose through his path of destruction, crossing off each task as it's completed. Without having a clear goal in mind, it would be difficult to know what tasks the goose would need to do, let alone make a list about it. Writing a data management plan is similar in that if you don't know what your general goals are for the research, it's going to be pretty difficult to write that plan. One thing I like to do is mind map my research before writing a data management plan. It helps me think through what my ultimate goals are and how the data in the project should be interacted with, and manage to support that goal. The second lesson is to treat your data management plan as a living document. Plans change, and just like in the game when I'm so close to stealing this man slippers and he catches me at the last minute, meaning I don't get to cross that off my list, things also happen that change our research. We might find out that some of the data we had hoped to collect is no longer available to us. We might lose a project team member. We might have a change in our funding situation. Your data management plan is not a static document. It's a living document in that it should change as your situation changes. A good way to ensure that your data management plan is used as a living document is to set aside a regular time in your research process to see if it needs any updates. You and your research team can decide the intervals, whether it's once a week, once a month, so on and so forth. But be sure to regularly check on your data management plan and see if it's still reflecting what's happening in your research. If not, update it. And while you're doing that, I'm going to keep trying to steal this man slippers. Finally, the third lesson is that while it might feel like a pain to take the time to write out your data management plan, knowing that things are probably going to change and you'll have to update it, is that your data management plan directly supports your research success. It's worth it to take the time now to plan all of these intricacies around your data in a project, even if you don't know all the details yet. That's okay. It's valuable to take the time to plan, and you'll be glad you did in the end. Look at the village goose, for example. Yes, it does take a considerable amount of time to get through all of these tasks and progress through each part of the village, but the reward at the end is a beautiful golden bell to add to a pit of other beautiful golden bells stolen as mementos of his wonderful time terrorizing this village. What more can a goose ask for? I hope this video has been entertaining and helpful for your own research process at CMU. All of us at CMU Libraries are here to support you in your journey and working with data and communicating with data. If you're writing a data management plan and would like us to review it for you and provide feedback, feel free to send us an email at data at CMU.libansers.com, and we'd be more than happy to chat. So until next time, thank you for watching and stay safe.