🐍 Orchestration and Embracing Analytic Turtles

What happens when 150 expert teams tackle the same question and same data? How to orchestrate small and large-scale analytic projects in Python?

A common assumption is that analytic workflow is a straight path from data to visualisation when the domain question is well scoped. In this talk, Charles will share insights from a project which challenges that assumption. In addition, we'll pop the analytic hood to deep dive orchestration implentation using Dagstar python assets to manage SQL, R, Python, and shell scripts in symphony.

Over 150 ecological research teams were provided with two well-scoped questions and accompanying smallish datasets of ecological field data with good coverage. Charles is applying various exploratory data analysis techniques to examine the different choices these research teams made. Her collaborator, Melbourne-based metascientist, Hannah Fraser designed the original experiment and keeps Charles tethered to the ecological context.

People speak of modelling choices as ‘forking paths’, but this analogy is too clean to describe the multitude of alternate choices uncovered. Instead, the more you look, the more you see: essentially it’s turtles all the way down. In this presentation, Charles will show the layers of analytic ‘turtles’ she has uncovered, beginning with the choice of source column in which there is surprisingly little consensus!

Come for pizza, and stay for a lively discussion about the many turtle facets of analytical choice.

Dr Charles T. Gray is a datapunk (variously applied mathematician, data scientist, data architect, analytics engineer, research software engineer) and reformed pianist. She has wrangled analytic questions in scientific research, video games, neuromarketing, and telecommunications across the last 15 years in Europe and Australia.

• 🌐 Network over 🍕 pizza and drinks 🍺🥤 with fellow Python users 🐍
• 👀 Watch a presentation
• 🗣️ Discuss the presentation
• 👥 and maybe hit the local pub!

---

📢 Interested in presenting? We'd love to have you, submit here!
💬 Want to chat? Get in touch via slack!

---

Thanks to our sponsors: Linux Australia and ANU!
Want to sponsor our costs for pizza and drinks, and meet our enthusiastic members? Get in touch!

---

You can find our Code of Conduct here: https://github.com/canberra-python/README/tree/main/conduct
We care about new people and quiet people, so we want to have some bare minimum standards that we expect.