Dirty Hands, Fake Gardens, & Bad Science
Dirty Hands
When we dig up the soil and get dirty hands, that is a fun thing. Digging and planting seeds to grow new plants that can later be harvested, measured, quantified, and analyzed, makes a lot of great sense; it is satisfying and can be controlled, like a clinical trial of sorts. You know what I mean.
Mining metadata is like digging the soil in many gardens at once, so it doesn’t tell us anything about any one garden and it certainly doesn’t tell us much about what plants grow there and what was harvested. Meta analyses are dataset combinations—meaning the combinations of many people digging in many gardens over many years and then recalling what they saw in those gardens is somewhat pointless, isn’t it?! Yet that is precisely what metadata analyses are and which are always used by the gardeners in this particular garden I am about to write about.
The Garden
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health



