Customer storyMagdalena Sañudo Cox
5,000 teeth, 50 sites, 30,000 years: turning fragmented data into analysis faster
Magdalena Sañudo Cox studies tooth wear in more than 600 individuals across seven chronologies from over 50 sites found 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 Sañudo Cox
- Field
- Dental anthropology
- Organization
- Monash University
“The assistance with coding has been a lifesaver and saved me months of troubleshooting syntax errors by myself. It also saved me heaps of organization time: 20 minutes with Bower organizing all my notes, written, typed, PDFs, docs, excels, field notes, etc., from the last year and a half into a cohesive database.”
At a glance
Statistical analysis from plain language
Magdalena describes the analysis she needs. Bower writes the code.
One consistent record across 50 sites hours → 20 minutes
Notes from 50 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
Her collection contains more than 5,000 modern human teeth spanning over 30,000 years of human history, coming from the mountainous northern Italian regions to beachy southern coastal Croatia. Investigating tooth wear from these varied locations allows her to reconstruct the diet and lifestyle of populations living in diverse geographic and social contexts across a long chronological scale.
Every tooth is first 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 even begins.
The challenges
Coding sat outside her expertise
Archaeological samples are often small and uneven: four individuals from the Paleolithic, thirty from the Iron Age, and 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.
Fifty sites, every note filed by hand
Magdalena files her notes by region, period and culture across seven chronologies and 50 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 and interpretation of data. Bower takes on the work outside her core expertise and speeds up the process: 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
50 sites, one consistent record
Bower categorizes her notes by region, period and culture across all 50 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 have Bower pull together notes where I’ve written them across my entire dataset helps me identify the connections and saves so many hours of manually combing through all of my notes.”