Stuart Geiger at University of Washington eScience Institute
Alum Stuart Geiger presented Cooking Data with Care: The Role of Contextual Inquiry in Large-Scale Quantitative Research at the University of Washington's eScience Institute.
The collection, curation, and analysis of data has always been as social as it is technical. Even in the most automated, data-driven systems, there are always humans who work behind the scenes, from the software developers and hardware operators who maintain invisible infrastructures to those who collect, label, annotate, clean, validate, merge, and manage data.
These activities tend to get far less attention than the headline-grabbing technologies of machine learning and artificial intelligence, but it is crucial to always keep them in view.
In this talk, Geiger specifically discussed the central yet often passed over role of documentation in data science, based on several recent and ongoing studies and projects about the role and importance of documentation in software packages, datasets, analysis code, research protocols, and research teams.
Following Stuart Geiger’s Data Science Studies talk, Data Science Studies and the QUAL Initiative convened a small group for a workshop-style discussion exploring how to incorporate qualitative methods into data science curricula and how to advance mixed-method research collaborations in data science.
For more information on the event and workshop see here.