[“Peacoat’” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Dovi: Welcome to the University of Washington Libraries Digital Scholarship Summer Immersion podcast. This podcast is a companion piece to the Digital Scholarship Summer Immersion program, or DSSI and is meant to give you a greater insight into the world of digital scholarship at the UW Libraries. In each episode, we interview a UW Libraries staff member whose work impacts or intersects with digital scholarship in some way. I’m Perry Yee and I’m the Online Learning Support Manager for the Libraries.

Elliott: I’m Elliott Stevens, the English Studies Librarian and the Research Commons Librarian.

Perry: And I’m Perry Yee, the Online Learning Support Manager with the UW Libraries. And we are the teaching team for the DSSI Podcast Track. For the last three years, we have offered online digital storytelling workshops using video and podcasting formats. We thought this podcast would be a great way to introduce ourselves, introduce our colleagues, and give you an idea of the breadth of digital scholarship support at the Libraries.

Our guest today is Jenny Muilenburg. Jenny is the Research Data Services Librarian and is from the Scholarly Communication and Publishing unit in the Libraries. Jenny, welcome to the show.

Jenny: Thank you.

Perry: We’re going to start off with some very personal questions to begin this interview. What’s your favorite thing about the summer?

Jenny: Well, you know I’m a midwestern transplant so pretty much the whole summer is good for me here. It’s way cooler and I love the fact that it’s light almost, well...almost til 10pm or after.

Perry: Do you have any memorable summer stories either from here or from the Midwest that you’d like to share?

Jenny: You know, I just… [sighs]...think one of my favorite things is being able to sit on something like Elliott Bay or Lake Washington and stare at mountains while it’s 72 with a light breeze [laughs]. That’s like my happy place.

Perry: Can you explain what you do at the UW Libraries?

Jenny: Yeah, so what I do, my little elevator speech, is that I help people work with data from the beginning of a project all the way through to the project’s publications. So if they’re looking to acquire data or figure out what kind of methodological or technological assistance they might need with data related to their research, all the way through the end of a project when they might want to share their data at the end.

Dovi: Can you tell us how that work might intersect with digital scholarship?

Jenny: Yeah, so what’s interesting is that, um, digital scholarship and data services are these terms that are sort of, they can mean different things to different people. Because there’s some overlap with what people do, somebody’s project might be considered data-ish. It might be using data as part of a digital scholarship project. And so there’s definite overlap what Verletta and I do so she and I try to work together to try to make sure that whatever services we’re offering for people working with data are very similar to the services we’re offering for people who are doing digital scholarship. By services, I mean all sorts of things. It can mean, you know, tools, guides to best practices, actual software services, whatever i tis.

Elliott: For our listeners, Jenny mentioned Verletta and if you haven’t listened to Verletta Kern’s episode, that’s another great episode to listen to for this podcast series. But Verletta is our digital scholarship librarian.

Dovi: So you mentioned a little bit about data management, why is this topic so important?

Jenny: Oh, it’s so important because I was taught that data management is easier than data forensics! So if you can keep yourself organized at the beginning of a project, it is way easier than at the end of a project trying to go back and figure out what you did earlier. So a good example is getting part way through maybe a data analysis and realizing that maybe you want to change, you know, whatever methodology you were using. You want to change a script, you want to change your approach. Maybe you did it a long time ago and don’t quite remember exactly how you got your results and trying to dig back in and figure it out can be hugely annoying. And that’s just one of many examples. [laughs]

Dovi: Thank you! And where does the UW Libraries fit into all of this?

Jenny: We at the Libraries provide either helpful guides or we acquire tools or services that could be either in-house or from third parties, all of which can kind of help people manage data throughout the research process. And then, in the Libraries we also work in this kind of concierge role where there are different centers and departments and experts on campus. It can be hard to find them because we’re so dispersed and we’re a very large university and so if people have a single point of contact at the Libraries to figure out where they need to go to get the right type of assistance, it’s just way easier to then trying to randomly Google for help.

Elliott: I’m still, I’m sorry to kind of jump in, but my mind is still wrapping itself around data forensics as a concept.

Jenny: Yeah.

Elliott: And to me, that’s really interesting compared to data management.

Jenny: Yeah.

Elliott: So let’s say if someone - a faculty member, a graduate student - does find themselves in a data forensics situation. Are they out of luck? Do we help in the Libraries with that kind of thing?

Jenny: Well a lot of that just depends on their working style. If they...I’ll give you an example. If someone’s got fields in a spreadsheet and has labeled them - Data 1, Data 2, Data 3, Data 4 - while they’re in the active part of their research process, they may know exactly what that means. And let’s say a year and a half later they’ve got another project and they think, “Oh, that data I used in that first project would be great to integrate into the second project.” But they can’t quite remember what Data 1, Data 2, Data 3, Data 4 are. So if they created documentation somewhere, they’re probably in great shape. But if they neither created documentation or used descriptive headers for their fields, then it can be really challenging to know exactly how, you know, what the data fields are, how they derived those fields, if there were any processes run in those fields.

Dovi: So where would be the first place someone should go when thinking about data management?

Jenny: Oh, we like to say, “ask anyone!” [laughs] You know, we have kind of a centralized Scholarly Communications and Publishing email address which eventually gets to either me or Verletta. That can be helpful for people who bridge that gap, you know, between the two...they’re not even disciplines really. If someone’s got a project that maybe needs help from both sides, we will both do that email. We also send a lot of people just to the Ask Us button on the Libraries website because it always gets routed to the right person.

Dovi: So what if folks wanted to better integrate data management into the classroom, their teaching? How would they go about doing that?

Jenny: Yeah, so we… like I’ve mentioned, we have - I don’t want to say a huge number of libguides - but a handful of libguides that can help people figure out what different approaches to dealing with data, depending on the type of data, and the type of project they’re doing, or maybe discipline-specific. We also have an online research data management class that we teach twice a year that’s a 4-day class that involves librarian tutors. And that is meant as a way to introduce people to the campus resources they have to help manage their data. And then they also meet individual librarians as well as peers in the course of that class.

Dovi: Cool, lots of really great Libraries resources. Are there any other tools or resources that you turn to personally?

Jenny: Oh, I always ask colleagues! And then there are groups on campus. So the eScience Institute is one for data. They tend to work with people who do what they call data intensive research. But we refer people with all sorts of data needs to them because they have a lot of technical expertise as well as methodological expertise in-house. And there are so many other centers on campus. This is why it gets confusing. There’s a Center for Statistics and a Center for Demography and Ecology. And there’s Applied Math. There’s all these different places people can go and so it’s nice to have kind of one place where people can get started finding whatever resources they need.

Elliott: And how do we know when data is singular or plural? That’s something I’m always confused about.

[Elliott and Jenny laugh.]

Elliott: What are your thoughts on this very controversial topic?

Jenny: Do you know a lot of people say that it has to be plural. And there’s also the issue of whether it’s data (“day-tah”) or data (“dah-tah”).

[Elliott laughs.]

Dovi: I still don’t know the answer.

Jenny: There is no clear answer!

Elliott: You know, thinking about data / data, these are concepts that just go back to the beginning of Libraries. The preservation of it, the management of it. But it also seems that these are things that are so hot or maybe trendy right now in Libraries too. It seems like a lot of new job descriptions of librarians… data is somehow part of it, or the visualization of it, or working with it. Seems that there are huge needs for working with faculty and with the way they preserve, manage, visualize their data. Where do you see that going here at the University of Washington? I mean, it seems like we’re in a certain place now. Where do you think we should be going? Or are going? And how does that in the world relate to digital scholarship?

Jenny: Yeah, that one is kind of complicated, I think! You know, there are fields that have already been using data as part of their disciplinary research for decades, obviously already. And there are some that are just starting to use data in any sort of large way. I think the challenge is going to be trying to decide what gets preserved and for how long because it’s certainly not the case that you need to preserve everything from everyone’s research project, but you both need to have some good criteria for deciding what needs to be capped and then you have to have, of course, a safe and reliable location to put that stuff. Um, so when we say that, you know, open data and data sharing are important concepts so that people can see and verify and reproduce things that have happened, making sure that that is located in a place that is stable. So that’s why a university library is a good place for help with this kind of thing because traditionally we are stewards of research information.

Elliott: When you first meet with a class or meet with a professor, do you find yourself talking about certain things regularly? Like, what are the things you usually talk about with someone who is knew either to this area or to just working with a librarian like you on this?

Jenny: A lot of times I have to do a little - I don’t want to say triage that makes it sounds serious - but you, there’s a little bit of an interview to figure out where they are in the process. So for people who are brand new and maybe looking to acquire data, that’s kind of a different data. If someone’s already working with data and they’re trying to figure out where to - what they can use for active storage while they’re doing research, maybe they’re collaborating with someone, they need a safe place to keep that data. All the way through to at the end of a project publishing it. So I’ll interview people to figure out what kind of resources it is that they need. Sometimes we teach some of these concepts and certain people will be very familiar with them and some not at all. So file naming schemes is a good example. We will teach people some of the different standards for how to name a file and some people will say, “Ah, I’ve been doing this since I was twelve. Thank you very much. I’ve got a handle on it.” And other people, it’s like a lightbulb goes off and they think, “It never occurred to me to use a standardized naming format for every file I create.” So some of it is some of your own personal preferences and your own training. Some of it’s very personal what you name a file. You, personally, Elliott, might want to put the date first. Someone else might want to put subject first. Some of these things are very personal, but it’s having something that’s habitual for you that you get into practice so that everything going forward fits the same format.

Elliott: Are there other things that people could do if they wanted to not just consult with you, but to teach this stuff? They want to teach others. Are there things where you think are great places to start with the teaching of these kinds of things? Are there things that you’ve seen teachers do that you’ve been really impressed by and maybe now adopt and adapt yourself?

Jenny: Yeah, you know, whenever someone is in a class, or when I go to class, I would say, either one...you have to make it personal for students. So I can go in and talk about naming, file naming structures, and folders, and different services for different types of research. But unless students are in the active phase of their research, you know it just kind of goes right past. And maybe they make some notes and think, “I’ll get back to this later.” And the example is I’ve done a recurring class to a Music Education class. So it’s real easy for me to tailor to that group of people because I know exactly what types of materials they’ll be dealing with. And even though they might be at the beginning of their PhD program, when I see them I can be very specific and they know two years from now they can come back to the library for help with whatever it is.

Elliott: So we have our DSSI listeners right now. Is there anything else you think they should know? Any advice you have? Or things that you find yourself thinking about in the field that you’re in?

Jenny: You know, I think the data publishing and sharing is very important. Whether your data is images or numbers or text or audio or whatever it is...a lot of times, what’s most important is maybe the end result of your analysis. But sometimes, it’s those building blocks that are really super helpful to either your future researching self or other researchers. You know, trying to identify what it is your doing that maybe has value for the next generation and whether or not that’s yourself is sort of irrelevant. Being able to identify that and try to preserve that part I think is super important.

Elliott: And does data have any place in podcasting?

Jenny: I don’t know. Well, depends on how you define data! Is it the sound file or is it the accessing of the sound file? Or both?

Elliott: Much to think about. Jenny, thank you so much for joining the DSSI podcast.

Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you!

[“Peacoat’” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Elliott: That’s all the time we have for today. Check the show notes for a link to the transcript for today’s recording. And subscribe to the DSSI Podcast on iTunes and Google Play and wherever you get your podcasts.

Music for this episode is provided by Blue Dot Sessions. Their song, Peacoat, served as our intro and outro music. Check them out at www.sessions.blue for recordings that are Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial work.

Thanks to Jenny Muilenburg for chatting with us. And a big thanks to you for listening to the DSSI Podcast. Catch you on the next episode.