If you have ever been to a JMP Discovery Summit or perhaps a JMP user group meeting you will no doubt have come across journal files. The first time you create one can be an unnerving experience since a new journal is simply a blank window. But that is their beauty: they are a blank canvass onto which you can save your JMP output. But more importantly they are a place to capture your thoughts.
I’m often asked what is the main strength of JMP. For me the answer is easy. It is a tool that allows me to perform train-of-thought analysis. That thought process will involve three main activities: data transformation, visualisation and modelling. But there is two potential pitfalls with this type of analysis; firstly it becomes repetitive – there are certain tasks that are performed over and over albeit as part of different “workflows”. And second, I am unable to sustain a train of thought for more than a few hours. Often my work takes days or weeks. If they are my own personal pet-projects they can take months. So whilst journals are great for communicating information to colleagues, for me the real power of journals is their ability to keep a thought-process alive even with all of the day-to-day distractions that we have to deal with.
Last month I started a project that involves modelling images of hand-written digits. I’ve written a few blogs about it, all with the tag hieroglyphics. SInce then I’ve been busy finishing off a JSL project, I’ve broken my finger, I’ve been robbed, I’ve had a vacation. Now I want to resume the project: where do I start? I have a project folder, it contains 3 data files, 27 JMP tables, 22 JSL scripts, and 1 journal file.
My journal has a number of distinct sections.
Source Data
A description of the original source data.
Data Tables
This not only gives me access to the data but also provides descriptions – essential for me because I tend to create lots of subsets of data.
Scripts
A better name would be scriptlets. Whilst there is no restriction on the length or complexity of these scripts, they tend to be very short snippets of code that perform a distinct task. Individually they don’t do much but by putting a sequence of them together you can construct a workflow.
Often I want to look at the code and maybe revise it for specific tasks so the journal contains a number of ‘view’ buttons that open the script in an editor rather than execute the code.
Workflows
A sequence of steps to perform specific outcomes. Typically these steps are supported by the above scripts (in essence the scripts section of a library of tasks that I orchestrate in the workflow section).
Here is the journal:
So with all the distractions of the last month I feel confident I can replay my previous trains of thought and start developing new ones.
17 May 2020 Update – I have put together an online course that takes a closer look at the process of building journal files. If you would be interested in this please DM me on my twitter handle: @PegaAnalytics.