Humans of Data: 019

"Digital preservation is a perfect field because it unites two things I’m passionate about: humanities and IT. I can work on a framework to keep the data for future generations. It’s always been important to do that whether the data is analogue or not. Data presents evidence, evidence that’s subject to story telling and interpretation. It opens up unlimited possibilities. If you want to understand how a community ticked at a certain time, literature gives you a representation of the time, of what moved people. Data that we create today can do the same thing.

Data can be literature, poetry, art or factual experimentation. It’s not just an output of research; it’s an output of creativity and of our life today. Sometimes we forget that. But we should spend more time talking about what works and what doesn’t work. We need to not always invent new models, but apply a model and see what happens - to use models and tools to curate and treat our data, and then it’s very important to look at these tools critically. And to improve them. There’s a lot of great output that has come out of projects but does anyone use it? There’s a gap in implementation. And funding’s becoming scarcer, so we need to find more effective ways to make tools sustainable and useable for the user communities. It’s frustrating."