Bret Alexander Beheim

teams past and present

Beheim Lab

My lab group takes students through the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture @ MPI-EVA. Contact me for more info.

Current

Former

Data Provenance Research Group

As part of the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture @ MPI-EVA, we organize computational and logistical support for a variety of faculty fieldsites worldwide.

Database Design

Organizing large-scale, longitudinal field data is a difficult task, but can be made much easier with recent advancements in software automation. Our research group is focused on providing support for multi-site, integrated long-form databasing. I have served as the database creator and primary maintainer for the Tsimane Health and Life History Project since 2012, which integrates economic and social interviews with biomedicine. A recent survey of work from this database in here. Many of the databases maintained within the Data Provenance Research Group follow similar formats to this initial template, including work in Nicaragua, India, Japan, Tanzania, and Mongolia.

Together with Daniel Redhead have also been an active developer for the ENDOW project database and serve as a data management advisor for the ENDOW project

Field Data Processing

In addition to databasing, our team is also involved with processing data as it is collected in the field. Primarily this involves digital transcription from paper to PDF to plaintext, routinized using the ecodata and yamltools R packages to allow high-throughput with automatic quality control.

Our work also involves audio transcription of recorded interviews and documentary film footage with videographer Karl Frost.

We also invest effort into digital data capture using tools like the ODK suite and the yamlform R package.

Current Team

Research Coordinator

Scientific Staff

Student Assistants