Journal
Units, missing hours, and the other scraps that should travel with a dataset
We turn away fewer logs for ugliness than for silence. A crooked spreadsheet can be cleaned. A column of numbers with no unit and no time zone cannot be drawn without guessing, and guessing is not the commission.
Send, at minimum:
- Units as printed on the instrument or in the logger menu (°C, mbar, NTU, mm, mm/s, and so on).
- Sampling interval, and any date it changed.
- The time basis: Georgian winter time, summer time, or “logger left on UTC,” if someone did that.
- Known gaps: holidays, a pulled probe, a flooded pit, a week the mill was down.
- Channel names that match the tags in the room, not new names invented for the email.
Photographs of paper charts are welcome when the time printed on the strip can be read. A photograph of a screen in a dark works, with glare over the axis, is not a log; it is a hint that a file export would be kinder.
If personal names of staff appear in the file, strike them or tell us to strike them. We need the hours and the values, not who was on shift, unless the question of the commission is about a named round.