Spotlight on: Garrett Speed

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?

I have experience working with cluttered terabytes of data from previous research positions, and I learned a lot from cleaning that up. Also, the university and research environment is exciting and constantly changing, so the opportunity to work in my field as a data steward was a perfect fit.

What is an activity/task of your role that you find yourself looking forward to?

I really like maps, and having the opportunity to work on geosciences data, and starting to manage our GIS servers really has me excited for helping researchers manage, share, and publish their data in interactive ways.

What is something unexpected that you can offer help with, if a colleague reaches out to you?

In addition to spatial skills, I have also acted as a professional photographer for collection digitization, so I can offer advice on 3D modelling with photogrammetry and finding small details through reflectance transformation imaging and decorrelation.

What do you think your community of research data professionals is missing?

I think we're missing a way to share our practicalities within disciplines; we communicate broadly about data management and making data FAIR, but I think it is difficult for users in a specific discipline to share procedures, software tools, and other notes and caveats that might come up.

What is a topic you would want to collaborate on with others?

Geotagged photo management, I've been trying to perfect this for a decade, but consistently bringing together the information for high quality datasets can be difficult.

Can you share with us a story from your work that was a highlight for you?

This past year I have been working with a retiring researcher to get their career of data onto modern data formats from legacy media such as tape drives, floppy disks, and CDs. This has required working through issues with faulty equipment, finding old equipment to use, finding the proper operating system and software, and standardizing the workflow for hundreds of old disks. I presented a pecha kucha about this project, and recorded a copy for YouTube, it can be found here.

Get in touch with Garrett on: website | Mastodon |

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