This post was authored by Erin Clary, Curation Coordinator at the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (Alliance), and Mikala Narlock, Director, Data Curation Network.
Mikala:
I recently had the privilege of co-presenting a CURATE(D) workshop at the 2024 IASSIST & CARTO Conference with Sophia Lafferty-Hess. We traveled to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and gave an abbreviated version of the Data Curation Fundamentals workshop. For this iteration, we were also fortunate to partner with colleagues from across Canada, who facilitated table conversations while we presented the core curriculum. As always, it was an absolute blast and we ran out of time!
Now that we’re more than a month out from the workshop, we wanted to spend some time reflecting on the workshop, integrating reflection as a practice to improve future iterations of this event. For this interview, I’m chatting with Erin Clary, Curation Coordinator at the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (Alliance). Erin was previously a member of the DCN through Dryad, and still remains connected by coordinating the Big Data Interest Group with Alex May (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)!
So Erin, I was wondering if you’d kick us off and start with some background information. In particular, what did we change within the curriculum for this workshop?
Erin:
I would love to, Mikala, and thank you for inviting me to have this conversation, and to reflect!
One thing that stands out for me, because I was really grateful for the experience, was the fact that you partnered with the Alliance’s Curation Expert Group! I think this is the first time the DCN has worked with an international organization to help facilitate your curriculum?
Lisa Johnston and Cynthia Hudson Vitale did present the CURATE(D) steps and introduce the primers to a Canadian audience in late 2019, at the Canadian Data Curation Forum — that was shortly before COVID closed the border! And may have been a slightly more condensed form, if you can imagine! The workshops at the Forum weren’t quite 3 hours. But that inspired a group of Canadian curators to connect with the DCN and to adapt the DCN’s CURATE(D) steps for use in a bilingual context, as CURATION – a term that worked equally well in French and English. So we were able to spotlight that resource in this workshop, as an example of how the original model could be adapted for use in a local context. And there were other small adjustments throughout, for instance to incorporate a few international examples from the legal and ethical landscape, in a nod to the fact that data are increasingly collected collaboratively, including across borders, and certainly accessed and reused across borders, so what was already a complex landscape becomes increasingly more complex!
I know there were other changes too: we were all keen to give participants a choice in the type of data they worked with, for a number of reasons – it was a joint IASSIST and CARTO workshop, and we knew participants would have varied backgrounds, and varied experiences working with data and varied comfort levels with curation, so having a variety of formats to work with was important. And I know you have hosted the workshop with multiple file types, but typically over the course of a day or two, right? So I think that was another adjustment you made, to pare back some content so this would fit in a 3-hour window!
And the structure of the workshop was adjusted, too. You and Sophia did a lot of the heavy lifting on presenting the curriculum – your familiarity with the content, in knowing where to spend more time, and where things could be condensed if we were running short on time, was really essential to getting through the material!
Mikala:
That was probably the biggest change, at least from my perspective: this was our first time teaching this in a model where we had two presenters at the front of the room, teaching the curriculum, and our colleagues from the Digital Research Alliance of Canada exclusively facilitating the table conversations. I thought this worked well for streamlining the event and keeping us on our very tight schedule, but I found I really missed those conversations. I didn’t get to know the attendees as well as I normally would, because I was doing the lecturing.
Erin, as someone who was at the table and not lecturing, how did it go?
Erin:
Wait, I think I presented one or two slides, right!? You’re welcome for that chance to take a sip of coffee! [honestly, yes! It was so needed!]
But, in all seriousness, as someone who was at the table and not lecturing, I felt really fortunate to be participating. As facilitators, we did work to help prepare for the event– getting familiar with our chosen dataset, refreshing ourselves on the CURATE(D) steps, etc – but then at the event, I felt like an active participant. I was in the weeds with other participants, and looking at a dataset through a different lens. Hearing their questions and hearing them draw on their experiences and expertise was so valuable. I’ve been working in curation with repositories for a little over 10 years, but I always learn something new when I’m looking at a dataset with other curators. And you and Sohpia are both so engaging! You know this curriculum, and I think you do an excellent job of drawing people in, and making people feel comfortable and open to actively participating. I also really appreciated hearing someone else talk about the profession, and the value in what we do, and to see all of that evidence and the framework we work within set out like that, the complexity and the challenge of what we do – it reminded me why I love this work, so I feel really fortunate in that sense!
So there is no doubt that it streamlined things to have you and Sophia move through the curriculum, and you were able to present more than we would have otherwise. And to me, it felt like you had a good rapport and back and forth with participants, but if you missed that more personal interaction and being able to assess how people are engaging because you’re sitting there with them – do you think you would structure a short workshop like this again?
Mikala:
That’s a great question, Erin, and I think very much to be determined! It did work well– and while I did miss those conversations, it just made logistics so much easier. There was no back and forth from the tables to the lectern, which meant we were able to stick rather rigidly to our schedule. I am so grateful to you all, as well as the IASSIST and CARTO 2024 planning committee, for the opportunity to test this abbreviated workshop. We’ve received a few requests in the past for international workshops– and for future conferences, I could see us adopting a similar approach.
What was most challenging when considering how to best present the information for an international audience?
Erin:
Possibly the sheer amount of information and resources that are available to pull from! And some of these topics, like policy and ethics, and ownership and rights are challenging enough to present at a high-level when you’re looking at them from a single national perspective – I am still learning with each new dataset. So I think it can be challenging to balance presenting content in a way that participants can see themselves and their experiences reflected in the content, without getting bogged down in all of the potential variation! We all had ideas for how to extend the curriculum to bring in more context for an international audience, but again, that 3-hours goes really fast! And you know what, I think that’s okay – to me, it made sense for us to present content from our perspective, and experiences, and what we know, while acknowledging that there is going to be variation!
We had also planned to facilitate a breakout conversation in French. Canada has 2 official languages, and our original intent was to support both. We weren’t able to do so in the end, because there was some uncertainty around whether our francophone facilitator would be able to attend. It is a challenge to create space for people to have meaningful conversations in their language of choice without siloing those conversations and the ideas that are coming out of them, so we have true knowledge exchange and cross-pollination of ideas, but it’s a worthwhile endeavor.
If we had a full day, or more, then more activities and more conversation would definitely be in order! I would love to know more about international initiatives and policies and resources from participants with lived experience!
Mikala:
Thanks Erin! We’re now at our final question– we’re almost there! This workshop took place at the start of the IASSIST/CARTO 2024 conference – what was one takeaway you had from the rest of the conference? Any standout presentations or posters?
Erin:
There were so many, do I have to pick just one?!
You know, I moved to Canada right before the COVID lockdown, and I’ve not participated in many in-person events since then, so I was finally able to meet a lot of my colleagues and collaborators from other institutions in person for the first time. The opportunity to network and engage in real life was awesome. Programming wise, there was a lot of conversation happening around AI, and if and how some of those technologies could be used, in an ethical manner, to assist researchers and practitioners with data management and data wrangling. I keep trying to avoid AI, but I think some of what was presented is drawing me in.
What about you? Any particular knockout presentation or takeaway from the conference?
Mikala:
Oh I completely agree with you and am not sure how I could pick just one! On a personal level, I loved this opportunity to see many people I had met back in March at the Community Data Toolkits Workshop. I was lucky enough to attend that event, and met so many brilliant individuals; it was a real privilege to connect with several of them again at the conference!
In terms of programming, the planning committee really knocked it out of the park. I’m slightly biased, as Sophia was one of the co-chairs, but honestly, there was not a single session I didn’t want to be in. Perhaps a standout for me was a session on trusted data environments, ensuring appropriate access to information that may need to be restricted. Deb Wiltshire presented about this from the perspective of a secure data center in Germany, and it’s been rattling around in my head ever since!
Thank you so much, Erin! It’s always a pleasure to collaborate. And, I’m already looking for more opportunities to bring our communities together.