become PEP8 compliant

[JessicaS11]

In #475, it was discovered that the flake8 linter action that had been running on PRs was outdated and therefore failing to post comments on PRs where PEP8 standards weren't met. Subsequent PRs are being used as an opportunity to come into compliance by making the needed edits on any files changed within that PR. However, a large number of changes are still required (primarily related to line length). For the sake of progress, #475 will be set to have a successful exit status even though there are errors (i.e. so the GitHub action passes), and maintainers/contributors are asked to take note of and address noncompliance moving forward. This issue documents the need for some intentional work towards meeting the standard.

[mfisher87]

@JessicaS11 We're fairly compliant with pycodestyle rules now! We could enable pep8-naming rules as well to become more PEP8 compliant. Do you think we can mark this complete after applying pep8-naming rules?

There are a lot more readability and quality rules available in our linter after this. To start, I'd really like to enable bugbear, pycodestyle warnings, and pyupgrade as I work! Huge timesavers.