Designing data infrastructure where people come first
The Mayi Kuwayu Study is a longitudinal survey and the largest national study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture, health and wellbeing. I joined the study team last year and have been redeveloping the data pipeline to be more transparent, reproducible, and easier to maintain. My original plan was to incorporate best practices, such as using targets and renv for ensuring reproducibility and pointblank and testthat for validation and testing, as well as writing nice code.
It was a good plan, but it didn’t fully consider the people in the study team. Being able to run code from start to finish without error might be reproducible in a technical sense, but is someone actually reproducing it if they don’t understand what the code is doing? Code is only reproducible so long as it’s maintainable. Since I’m the only experienced R-user (for now), each additional package I use is a package someone else has to understand and runs the risk of making the code less reproducible.
In this session I’ll be talking about: - the Mayi Kuwayu Study and team context - development of the data pipeline - the role people played in design decisions - using the development as an opportunity to upskill my team
Ben Harrap
Dr Benjamin Harrap (they/them) is a biostatistician by training and has worked with data from all manner of contexts and sources, from clinical trials and observational studies to census and linked administrative data.
They currently work at Yardhura Walani (Ngunnawal for a strong, powerful and healthy energy and place) on Mayi Kuwayu: The National Study of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing, providing data management, survey design, and statistical expertise. Recently, Ben’s been using R and Quarto to rework the study’s data management pipeline into something beautiful and functional, and has used this as an opportunity to upskill colleagues interested in learning R.
When Ben’s not thinking about data, which is rare, you can find them posting silly things on Bluesky, cooking up something in the kitchen, or playing whatever games are on their toddler’s agenda.