The process of transforming data into understanding constitutes the vast majority of time, energy, and intellectual effort spent during scientific inquiry. This is true across domains, whether data is the product of a computational simulation, a telescope observation, the synthesis of sensors distributed across the Earth, or a collection of images of the human brain. Data, by themselves, do not reflect an understanding of the Universe or its underlying physical properties; rather, they are recordings, or measurements, of the state of systems as observed. Even for computational simulations, such as simulations of star formation in the galaxy, this is true: these simulations encode information about a discretization of a model, rather than the model itself.
Bridging the gap between this discretization and the physical understanding requires accessing data, manipulating and interrogating this data, and then applying to this data a sense of understanding. Somehow, bits stored on a disk must become, in our minds, a galaxy undergoing a starburst.
This process is both mediated and impeded by computational tools. When those tools align with our mental model of how data exists, they can allow us to work more efficiently, asking questions of data and building sophisticated scientific inquiry. However, when they do not, they can cause frustration, delays, and most worryingly, incorrect or misinterpreted results. When viewing this from the perspective of the landscape of inquiry, the most startling realization is that the questions a computational tool enables individuals to ask shapes the questions they think to ask.
In [@doi:10.1088/0067-0049/192/1/9], the analysis platform yt was described.
At the time, yt was focused on analyzing and visualizing the output of
grid-based adaptive mesh refinement hydrodynamic simulations; while these were
used to study many different physical phenomena, they all were laid out in
roughly the same way, in rectilinear meshes of data. In this paper, we present
the current version of yt, which enables identical scripts to analyze and
visualize data stored as rectilinear grids as before, but additionally particle
or discrete data, octree-based data, and data stored as unstructured meshes.
This has been the result of a large-scale effort to rewrite the underlying
machinery within yt for accessing data, indexing that data, and providing it
in efficient ways to higher-level routines, as discussed in Section Something.
While this was underway, yt has also been considerably reinstrumented with
metadata-aware array infrastructure, the volume
rendering infrastructure has been rewritten to be more user-friendly and
capable, and support for non-Cartesian geometries has
been added.
The single biggest change to yt since that paper was published has not been
technical in nature. In the intervening years, a directed and intense
community-building effort has resulted in the contributions from over a hundred
different individuals, many of them early-stage researchers, and a thriving
community of both users and developers. This is
the crowning achievement of development, as we have attempted to build yt
into a tool that enables inquiry from a technical level as well as fosters a
supportive, friendly community of individuals engaged in self-directed inquiry.