Jupyter Notebooks, the PmagPy Software Package and the Magnetics
Information Consortium (MagIC) Database
Abstract
Magnetics Information Consortium (MagIC), hosted at
http://earthref.org/MagIC, is a database that serves as a Findable,
Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) archive for paleomagnetic and
rock magnetic data. It has a flexible, comprehensive data model that can
accomodate most kinds of paleomagnetic data.The PmagPy software package
is a cross-platform and open-source set of tools written in Python for
the analysis of paleomagnetic data that serves as one interface to
MagIC, accommodating various levels of user expertise. It is available
through github.com/PmagPy. Because PmagPy requires installation of
Python and the software package, there is a speed bump for many
practitioners on beginning to use the software. In order to make the
software and MagIC more accessible to the broad spectrum of scientists
interested in paleo and rock magnetism, we have prepared a set of
Jupyter notebooks, hosted on jupyterhub.earthref.org which serve a set
of purposes. 1) There is a complete course in Python for Earth
Scientists, and 2) a set of notebooks that introduce PmagPy (importing
the software package from the github repository). These notebooks
illustrate how to conduct statistical analyses, synthesize create data
and create data visualizations of the type that are typically included
in papers in the field. The notebooks also demonstrate how to prepare
data from the laboratory for the MagIC database. This pathway gives
additional tools to researchers so that they can satisfy data archiving
requirements from NSF and publishers such as AGU.