Spotlight on: Hanna Fricke
Every other week, the Thematic DCCs and the Data Steward Interest Group (DSIG) put the spotlight on one research data steward working in the Netherlands to stimulate knowledge exchange and peer-to-peer learning.
What drew you towards the research data management field?
When doing linguistic research, I always liked the aspect of finding a good system to organize my (fieldwork) data well. In addition, I highly valued the archiving of linguistic research data for reuse. When working with endangered languages, archiving language materials is essential for the documentation of linguistic diversity, as well as the documentation of cultural diversity around the world. Without proper documentation of the world's linguistic diversity, general theories on grammar, language acquisition, language change will always be biased. Furthermore, openly available (endangered) language data can be reused not only for scientific purposes but also for educational and language revitalization efforts by the members of the respective communities themselves.
What is an activity/task of your role that you find yourself looking forward to?
I like to think about how to improve processes and information provision for researchers and other target groups and then subsequently implement changes to improve current workflows and situations. I also like to give courses and presentations on RDM topics and think along with researchers on how to best approach a RDM issue they are facing.
What is something unexpected that you can offer help with, if a colleague reaches out to you?
Due to my linguistic fieldwork background, I can offer training on linguistic data collection methods and software used in the field of language description and documentation.
What do you think your community of research data professionals is missing?
The inclusion of research data management into the BA/MA programs, and ideally data stewards who specifically focus on education. I am thinking of this because we face the issue that we - at our faculty - only have "research data stewards" supporting those affiliated with a research school within the faculty. However, in reality, we also deal a lot with student data as well, but there are no/less policies and RDM facilities for secure storage and archiving available for students.
What is a topic you would want to collaborate on with others?
Developing good and detailed policy around research data accessibility after a research project has ended, in general but especially for young researchers who frequently switch institutions but need to build their academic profile and therefore often needs continued access to data from past projects. This policy should take various - sometimes conflicting - regulations into account, such as intellectual property rights, GDPR compliance and the FAIR principles.
How would you like to see your current field of work evolve in the next 5 years?
This would be my ideal view of the future: Our faculty will develop a clear vision or plan on how the faculty wants to shape RDM support in the future. This includes more task division or clearer lines between RDM support for researchers, RDM support for students as well as GDPR compliance support. I would also like to see a greater focus on executing RDM rather than drawing up DMPs.
Get in touch with Hanna on LinkedIn | UvA website
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