Data Praxis (Interview)
I had the pleasure of being interviewed by data librarian superstar Thomas Padilla for a new column he’s starting at dh + lib called Data Praxis, which he hopes will showcase folks working with humanities data at all steps in the pipeline.
An excerpt:
Based on your comments and prior blog posts such as, “Tidy (Art) Historical Data”, it seems that you put a great deal of care into thinking about how your data and research processes are documented and shared. Perhaps it’s a bit of a brusque way to ask, but what made you care? How did you learn how to care? Who did you learn from?
I started caring because I saw smart people doing it. I still care because I experienced the practical benefits in a real way… On the other side of it, I’ve also had to deal with anti-patterns in documentation. Because I work almost exclusively with data that other people have assembled, I’m painfully conscious of how much the lack of documentation, and/or the assumption that people will only ever use your data the same way that you did, can hinder productive re-use of data.
