Spotlight on: Katherine Marcoux
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?
After completing my PhD in linguistics, I realized that while I had learned a lot from my studies, I was ready for something different. I care about and value research, so my role as data steward was a perfect shift. I get to remain close to research by supporting researchers.
What is an activity/task of your role that you find yourself looking forward to?
One of my favorite things about working in the RDM field is just how open and friendly everyone is! Everyone is willing to help teach and share what they know. This happens naturally within the DCC, but also whenever I reach out to fellow data stewards at other universities.
Working with the data stewards at the research institutes to update their RDM Guidelines was very rewarding for this reason. Due to the open and friendly collaboration, we were able to learn from each other, and with a colleague created a template that can be used for their RDM Guidelines.
What is something unexpected that you can offer help with, if a colleague reaches out to you?
My PhD was focused on linguistics for which I used Praat, Python, and R daily for extracting acoustic information from a large corpus of audio files and running statistics. Therefore, I am always happy to help with any of these tasks, or simply finding the right color palette for your graph.
What do you think your community of research data professionals is missing?
Often, as data stewards, our focus is on researchers. However, there seems to be a gap when it comes to RDM for students. Luckily, it seems that recently many institutes have become aware of this gap and are also focusing on students and how we can teach them good RDM practices.
What is a topic you would want to collaborate on with others?
My interest in RDM for students stems from my role as product owner of RIS for Students (a tool where student can archive the thesis data and write a DMP) as well as being a member of the workgroup “RDM for Students” which I am involved with fellow data stewards from several Dutch universities. I am therefore always interested in hearing what other universities offer in terms of resources for students (e.g., DMP templates or tools, courses, archives). So, please reach out and let me know if you have any ideas on how we can collaborate on resources or tools for students for which there is a need.
Could you point us to a resource, learning platform, tool or similar which you find useful or inspirational?
I find the Open Science: A Practical Guide for Early-Career Researchers a wonderful resource that makes Open Science attractive and accessible. The document covers the basics with the perfect level of detail and references to other resources for more information.
Get in touch with Katherine on LinkedIn
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