I'm at home today owing to last night's epic snowfall in Madison shutting down practically the entire university, so it's time for tidbits!
- The biggest data story of the week is the climate-data hijacking. Gavin Baker has the best roundup I've seen. I also strongly recommend Cameron Neylon's thought-provoking response.
- The Digital Curation Blog has a lengthy series of roundup posts on the just-past International Digital Curation Conference. Next year in Chicago! I will be there with bells on.
- Climate change for libraries. No, nothing to do with the climate data scandal; instead, a cogent exploration of why libraries ought to be involved earlier in the research process, and how we might go about getting involved.
- When tools aren't curated: Deepak Singh notes with irritation the shutting-down of two software projects that were useful in his work. This, too, is part of data curation: once software tools are used on data in the course of research, those tools are part of the scholarly record. (They could, after all, have been poorly coded or based on faulty assumptions; that needs to be known.)
- JISC claims that data-sharing happens more often these days. True, I suppose, but to me this article had a whiff of the wishing-it-so about it.
- With data available to all, will there be more citizen science? I hope so, not least because of the implications for general scientific literacy.
- This week's "good use of data" award goes to Matthew Wilkens for this lovely, lucid explanation of why text-mining is a necessary approach to literary criticism and analysis. (Not the necessary approach, mind you, but one among many.) His argument is even stronger in linguistics, where the aesthetics usually don't obtain.
- On the jobs front, the University of New Mexico is looking for a social sciences/humanities data librarian. (Seems an odd combo, unless UNM's social-science research is predominantly qualitative.)
Regarding that last one, would it be helpful for me to try to maintain a jobs roundup here? If you think so, drop me a comment. I'd also appreciate pointers to good places to spot such jobs. I know most of the library sources, but based on this poster helpfully pointed out to me by commenter Nic Weber, a lot of the job ads will go out in science venues.
Here's hoping my choir's dress rehearsal scheduled for tonight can actually happen… in the meantime, I raise my hot-chocolate mug to you all.
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Every time I do a tidbits post, I think to myself, "gosh, that was a lot of tidbits; I'll never fill up the queue again."
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A jobs thing would prolly only be useful to your US readers, (unless you are willing to try to do it globally - egad...) so no, I wouldn't want that. Sherpa runs a good one for us in the UK already [http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/jobs/index.html]
I'll bet UNM is looking for a librarian to assist with managing both social science AND humanities data resources....
Well, yes, Lee, I assume so! (Hi, by the way; good to see you here!) It's just a weird idea from where I'm sitting.
When I think "humanities data curation" I think image digitization, text encoding (particularly TEI), and multimedia management. When I think about social-science data, I think about statistical tools and GIS, mostly. The skillsets just seem very disjoint, and not terribly likely to turn up in the same person.
Perhaps I'm wrong!
Dorothea, we've been collecting science, social science, and humanities jobs data for our research here, so let me know if you'd ever like the list of sites we've been collecting them from.
I would love that list! With your permission, I think it would be a fantastic thing to post here, actually.
Many thanks!