Colab documentation

[dbirman]

You need more detail here and less rationale. It's sometimes useful to mention why we made a particular design choice, but mostly we just need to make sure that someone who is joining the Urchin project in the future can quickly understand how we built the tutorials. To be clear the Development documentation is not for users! It's for us for the future, basically meta-comments for our code. See for example the https://virtualbrainlab.org/misc/brain_atlas.html documentation that I've been uploading.

As an example of what I mean by additional detail. Take this sentence: "Any data can be accessed within the notebook once uploaded to Google Drive, and accessed with the help of the gspread library.". This doesn't help someone who doesn't know where the current files are stored (it's all one folder, so you should link to it), and it doesn't help someone who has never used gspread they are still going to have to go and look that up or ask ChatGPT for help. Also aren't we not using the gspread library anyways?

Instead I would write something like: Data files can't be stored in the urchin-examples repository and because each colab notebook will run in the users account, we also don't want to distribute data to each user separately. Instead, files should be uploaded to a publicly shared google drive folder and downloaded as part of the notebook initialization. For Urchin data you can use . Generate the raw file download link for each file and then use these code snippets to load the data in your notebook:

code necessary to download data from a csv file

code for a npy file

code for a parquet file

code for an image

etc...

[jasmine-schoch]

Restructured entire Colab section + added more directions + detail