I’m just back from IDCC20, so here are a few reflections on this year’s conference. You can find all the available slides and links to shared notes on the conference programme. There’s also a list of all the posters and an overview of the Unconference

Skills for curation of diverse datasets

Here in the UK and elsewhere, you’re unlikely to find many institutions claiming to apply a deep level of curation to every dataset/software package/etc deposited with them. There are so many different kinds of data and so few people in any one institution doing “curation” that it’s impossible to do this for everything. Absent the knowledge and skills required to fully evaluate an object the best that can be done is usually to make a sense check on the metadata and flag up with the depositor potential for high-level issues such as accidental disclosure of sensitive personal information.

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Tuesday 3 March 2020 Jez Cope Conference IDCC20 IDCC Digital curation

Just a quickie to say that I’ve replaced the comment section at the bottom of each post with webmentions, which allows you to comment by posting on your own site and linking here. It’s a fundamental part of the IndieWeb, which I’m slowly getting to grips with having been a halfway member of it for years by virtue of having my own site on my own domain.

I’d already got rid of Google Analytics to stop forcing that tracking on my visitors, I wanted to get rid of Disqus too because I’m pretty sure the only way that is free for me is if they’re selling my data and yours to third parties. Webmention is a nice alternative because it relies only on open standards, has no tracking and allows people to control their own comments. While I’m currently using a third-party service to help, I can switch to self-hosted at any point in the future, completely transparently.

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Thursday 16 January 2020 Jez Cope Open culture IndieWeb DWeb Fediverse

It looks like I’ve accidentally taken charge of bridging a bunch of The Carpentries Slack channels over to Matrix. Given this, it seems like a good idea to explain what that sentence means and reflect a little on my reasoning. I’m more than happy to discuss the pros and cons of this approach

If you just want to try chatting in Matrix, jump to the getting started section

What are Slack and Matrix?

Slack (see also on Wikipedia), for those not familiar with it, is an online text chat platform with the feel of IRC (Internet Relay Chat), a modern look and feel and both web and smartphone interfaces. By providing a free tier that meets many peoples’ needs on its own Slack has become the communication platform of choice for thousands of online communities, private projects and more.

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Monday 25 November 2019 Jez Cope Open culture Technology The Carpentries Fediverse Communication

The other weekend I had my first experience of Mozilla Festival, aka #mozfest.

It was pretty awesome.

I met quite a few people in real life that I’ve previously only known (/stalked) on Twitter, and caught up with others that I haven’t seen for a while.

I had the honour of co-facilitating a workshop session on imposter syndrome and how to deal with it with the wonderful Yo Yehudi and Emmy Tsang. We all learned a lot and hope our participants did too; we’ll be putting together a summary blog post as soon as we can get our act together!

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Sunday 24 November 2019 Jez Cope mozfest

Today¹ the office conversation turned to blocking out background noise. (No, the irony is not lost on me.) Like many people I work in a large, open-plan office, and I’m not alone amongst my colleagues in sometimes needing to find a way to boost concentration by blocking out distractions. Not everyone is like this, but I find music does the trick for me. I also find that different types of music are better for different types of work, and I use this to try and manage my energy better.

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Saturday 26 October 2019 Jez Cope Stuff Music Concentration Mental health

It barely seems like it, but I’ve been at the British Library now for nearly 6 months. It always takes a long time to adjust and from experience I know it’ll be another year before I feel fully settled, but my team, department and other colleagues have really made me feel welcome and like I belong.

One thing that hasn’t got old yet is the occasional thrill of remembering that I work at my national library now. Every now and then I’ll catch a glimpse of the collections at Boston Spa or step into one of the reading rooms and think “wow, I actually work here!”

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Sunday 5 May 2019 Jez Cope Reflection British Library

I sit here writing this in the departure lounge at Philadelphia International Airport, waiting for my Aer Lingus flight back after a week at the 13th Research Data Alliance (RDA) Plenary (although I’m actually publishing this a week or so later at home). I’m pretty exhausted, partly because of the jet lag, and partly because it’s been a very full week with so much to take in.

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Saturday 13 April 2019 Jez Cope Conference Research data management RDA Plenary

I recently attended a workshop, organised by the excellent team of the Turing Way project, on a tool called BinderHub. BinderHub, along with public hosting platform MyBinder, allows you to publish computational notebooks online as “binders” such that they’re not static but fully interactive. It’s able to do this by using a tool called repo2docker to capture the full computational environment and dependencies required to run the notebook.

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Thursday 14 March 2019 Jez Cope Technology Reproducibility Open research Python