Customer storyMagdalena Sanudo Cox
5,000 teeth, 30 sites, 30,000 years: turning fragmented data into analysis faster
Magdalena Sanudo Cox studies tooth wear in more than 5,000 teeth across seven chronologies and 30 sites in Italy and Croatia. With Bower, she runs statistical analysis from plain-language requests, organizes her notes in minutes and finds any source across her project with one search.
- Researcher
- Magdalena Sanudo Cox
- Field
- Dental anthropology
- Organization
- Monash University
“The coding has been a lifesaver. And even just organizing the data, Bower did that really quickly: 20 minutes, compared to me doing it for hours and hours.”
At a glance
Statistical analysis from plain language
Magdalena describes the analysis she needs. Bower writes the code, explains the analysis and synthesizes the results.
One consistent record across 30 sites hours → 20 minutes
Notes from 30 sites and seven chronologies organized in about 20 minutes.
Find the source in minutes
A keyword search pulls every related note from across the project, instead of manually combing through everything she has written, which used to take days.
The situation
15,000 data points before the analysis begins
Magdalena Sanudo Cox is a PhD candidate in dental anthropology, tracing how human teeth wear across 30,000 years of history. Her collection runs to more than 5,000 modern human teeth from around 660 individuals, and her project spans seven chronologies and 30 sites in Italy and Croatia, coastal and inland, north to south.
Every tooth is scored by eye on the Smith 1984 wear scale, three times, two weeks apart: more than 15,000 data points before the digital analysis of macrowear and microwear begins.
The challenges
Coding sat outside her expertise
Archaeological samples are small and uneven: four individuals from the Paleolithic, around sixty from the Roman period. Samples like these call for specific statistical approaches, and writing the code to run them pulled Magdalena away from the work she does best.
Thirty sites, every note filed by hand
Magdalena files her notes by region, period and culture across seven chronologies and 30 sites. Just keeping that consistent was consuming hours of her days.
Finding a source meant rereading everything
She notes key points and her own reactions against every source she reads. When she remembered a method but not which source used it, she had to comb through all of her notes by hand.
What changed
Magdalena focuses on the teeth. Bower handles the rest.
Magdalena makes the scientific calls, from the wear score on each tooth to the statistical approach. Bower takes on the work outside her core expertise: writing the code, structuring her notes and finding what she has already written.
01Analysis
From question to analysis in minutes
She describes the analysis in plain language. Bower writes the code and explains what was run, so her time goes into interpreting the results.
02Organization
30 sites, one consistent record
Bower categorizes her notes by region, period and culture across all 30 sites in Italy and Croatia. Work that took hours of her day now takes 20 minutes.
03Search
Every related note, one search
A keyword search pulls together related notes from across the whole project, so she finds the source behind a method in minutes.
“Being able to search keywords and see if I’ve also written that in other notes across the entire dataset, and pull it all together, saves so many hours of manually combing through all of my notes.”