The 4th annual All Hands Meeting was held virtually from Jun 22-24, 2021 from 1-4pm EST each day. Special thanks to the planning team that made the virtual format fun, participatory, and informative: Liza Coburn (DCN/Minnesota), Katie Wissel (NUY), Wendy Kozlowski (Cornell), Dorris Scott (WashU), Wanda Marsolek (Minnesota), and Jennifer Moore (WashU).
Highlights from the meeting!
Day 1 focused on “Transitioning the DCN to a member-driven community of practice.”
- We welcomed new curators from Duke, Dryad, NYU and the three new member institutions joining us in year 4: U Nebraska Lincoln, the Michael J Fox Foundation, and Colorado U-Boulder.
- DCN Director Lisa Johnston presented on the new membership model, the budget for next year (where membership fees go) and gave an overview of key changes to the DCN as we transition from grant-funded project to member-sustained organization.
- More DCN business included updates from the DCN Mission & Values, the Governance model group, and the Racial Justice Working group, including discussion of next steps from Fay Cobb Payton’s report: Centering Racial Justice in the DCN.
- The business meeting ended with a summary of all the great work we set out to do in Year 3 and the ideas for next year before gathering for a happy hour in gather.town!
Day 2 focused on our education and professional development and we were joined by Data Curation Workshop alumni and the Portage CEG which brought us over 60 attendees! One great thing about having this meeting virtually is all of the great conversation happening in chat during presentations!
- After a fun attendee icebreaker, DCN Coordinator Liza Coburn, with some help from DCN Representative from UCSB, Greg Janée, provided a summary of some DCN statistics – details about dataset submissions, expertise, coverage, gaps, results, etc.!
- Next we ran a “refresher” training of the CURATE model with a panel of DCN curators who gave examples of how they approached each step when curating datasets. Special thanks to our panelists Chen Chiu (JHU), Melinda Kernik (Minnesota) and Xuying Xin (Penn State) for sharing their experiences!
- Portage CEG members Michael Steelworthy and Alex Cooper presented their process for adapting the CURATE steps into their own (bilingual!) model – the CURATION steps. The CURATION model is still under review, but stay tuned for its release!
- We also heard updates from the Refining the Curation Protocol group and DCN Education where DCN Representative from Penn State, Hannah Hadley, previewed the new primers and the adaptation of our workshop content into a virtual platform (GitHub).
- During the happy hour some broke off to play games (tetris!) but there was also a pretty solid group that remained in Zoom to talk about Readmes and workflows for generating better Readmes!
Day 3 was a whirlwind of research and sharing, in the best way!
- Our first lightning talk session featured 7 primer teams presenting on their Data Curation Primers:
- Twitter – Marley Kalt (JHU) and Dorris Scott (Wash U)
- Databases – Xuying Xin (Penn State) and Dave Fearon (JHU)
- Oral Histories – Matthew Harp (Arizona) and Sara Mannheimer (Montana)
- Neuroimaging – Helenmary Sheridan (U of Pittsburgh)\
- SAS – Qiong Xu (Joan) (Queens College, CUNY)
- ISO Disk Image Primer – Kate Barron (Stanford) and Jonathan Bohan (Cornell)
- Qualitative Data Curation Primer – Mikala Narlock (Notre Dame)
- Next we heard from two DCN research project teams: first, US-based data repository “levels of curation” and their perceived value, and second, end-user satisfaction of curation services at DCN repositories. Both teams have papers in the works!
- After a quick break we went into a breakout session with four DCN interest groups. Thanks to our gracious volunteer hosts: Wendy Kozlowski (Cornell) for big data, Jen Darragh (Duke) for human subjects, Sophia Lafferty-Hess (Duke) for campus advocacy and outreach and Hannah Hadley (Penn State) for education and CURATE for grad students. A few of us stayed in the main room talking about potential interest group topics (automating curation, for ex. generating readmes on ingest).
- Our second lightning talk session featured 8 short talks by the DCN community.
- Heidi Imker (U Illinois) – Fun story on data reuse
- Seth Erickson (Penn State) – Data curation & media manipulation
- Katie Wissel (NYU) – Features of a “reuser oriented” data repository
- Jake Carlson (Michigan) – Building “Data communities”
- Hoa Luong (Illinois) – Interesting human subjects dataset
- Wendy Kozlowski (Cornell) – Complex dataset story
- Cynthia Hudson Vitale (ARL) – JeSLIB Special Issue on Data Curation
- Alexis Logsdon (Minnesota) – The Medium is (Part of) the Message
Thanks to everyone who attended and everyone who presented. It was so much fun to have members of the Portage CEG and workshop alumni join us and overall the meeting was a resounding success and we can’t wait until next year’s meeting!
