{"id":1061,"date":"2017-02-23T14:24:08","date_gmt":"2017-02-23T14:24:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/codata.org\/blog\/?p=1061"},"modified":"2017-02-23T14:24:08","modified_gmt":"2017-02-23T14:24:08","slug":"humans-of-data-012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/codata.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/23\/humans-of-data-012\/","title":{"rendered":"Humans of Data 12"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_3744-KA2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

“My first job after university, I was doing computer stuff in a medical research place. I got a reputation as someone who was good at rescuing things off of old tapes and punchcards.\u00a0 It had been expensive to collect that data, and people had sometimes suffered in providing it. But it was also a detective job and it was important.\u00a0 But it was disappointing (though great for me professionally) when years later, I could come back into the field, and the sense of what was wrong then was still there. We still lose data because it\u2019s on some piece of media that someone neglects or we\u2019ve lost the documentation. Or we lose it because nobody knows where it is. If we don\u2019t know it exists someone goes and repeats the work.<\/p>\n

Now being able to work with this community of other people is great, making sure that stuff that could be of value in the future gets kept \u2013 it matters in lots of ways.\u00a0 It matters because it saves us money, and that is important because it\u2019s our taxes. And it matters because collectively as a society we\u2019ll learn stuff from it: data can help prevent disasters, it can help improve crops, and many other important things in society.<\/p>\n

This community is important to what I do every day. The only negative thing is that it gives you the sense of too many possibilities.\u00a0 And you think, \u2018Yeah, I can help you do this thing\u2019.\u00a0 And you don\u2019t have time to do it all, which can be a crushing disappointment.\u00a0 But it\u2019s so nice to learn a bunch of things, and it\u2019s an embarrassment of riches – things you can go and do, people you can collaborate with.\u00a0 My job is often telling one group of people, \u2018Hey, you should know about this other group\u2019.\u00a0 If that helps someone to reach out and collaborate, I feel like I\u2019ve done something positive.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“My first job after university, I was doing computer stuff in a medical research place. I got a reputation as someone who was good at rescuing things off of old tapes and punchcards.\u00a0 It had been expensive to collect that data, and people had sometimes suffered in providing it. But it was also a detective […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humans-of-data","category-idcc-2017"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/codata.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/codata.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/codata.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codata.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codata.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1061"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/codata.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1077,"href":"https:\/\/codata.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1061\/revisions\/1077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/codata.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codata.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codata.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}