eRambler

eRambler
Jez Cope's blog
	When is a persistent identifier not persistent? Or an identifier?
I wrote a post on the problems with ISBNs as persistent identifiers (PIDS) for work, so check it out if that sounds interesting.
	IDCC20 reflections
I’m just back from IDCC20,
so here are a few reflections on this year’s conference.
You can find all the available slides and links to shared notes
on the conference programme.
There’s also a list of all the posters
and an overview of the Unconference

Skills for curation of diverse datasets
Here in the UK and elsewhere,
you’re unlikely to find many institutions
claiming to apply a deep level of curation
to every dataset/software package/etc
deposited with them.
There are so many different kinds of data
and so few people in any one institution doing “curation”
that it’s impossible to do this for everything.
Absent the knowledge and skills required
to fully evaluate an object
the best that can be done is usually to make a sense check on the metadata
and flag up with the depositor potential for high-level issues
such as accidental disclosure of sensitive personal information.
The Data Curation Network in the United States
is aiming to address this issue by
pooling expertise across multiple organisations.
The pilot has been highly successful
and they’re now looking to obtain funding
to continue this work.
The Swedish National Data Service
is experimenting with a similar model,
also with a lot of success.
As well as sharing individual expertise,
the DCN collaboration has also produced
some excellent online quick-reference guides
for curating common types of data.
We had some further discussion 
as part of the Unconference on the final day
about what it would look like
to introduce this model in the UK.
There was general agreement that this was a good idea
and a way to make optimal use of sparse resources.
There were also very valid concerns
that it would be difficult in the current financial climate
for anyone to justify doing work for another organisation,
apparently for free.
In my mind there are two ways around this,
which are not mutually exclusive
by any stretch of the imagination.
First is to Just Do It:
form an informal network of curators
around something simple like a mailing list,
and give it a try.
Second is for one or more trusted organisations
to provide some coordination and structure.
There are several candidates for this
including DCC, Jisc, DPC and the British Library;
we all have complementary strengths in this area
so it’s my hope that we’ll be able to collaborate around it.
In the meantime,
I hope the discussion continues.
Artificial intelligence, machine learning et al
As you might expect at any tech-oriented conference
there was a strong theme of AI running through many presentations,
starting from the very first keynote from Francine Berman.
Her talk,
The Internet of Things: Utopia or Dystopia?
used self-driving cars as a case study
to unpack some of the ethical and privacy implications of AI.
For example,
driverless cars can potentially increase efficiency,
both through route-planning and driving technique,
but also by allowing fewer vehicles to be shared by more people.
However,
a shared vehicle is not a private space in the way your own car is:
anything you say or do while in that space
is potentially open to surveillance.
Aside from this,
there are some interesting ideas being discussed,
particularly around the possibility of using machine learning
to automate increasingly complex actions and workflows
such as data curation and metadata enhancement.
I didn’t get the impression anyone is doing this in the real world yet,
but I’ve previously seen theoretical concepts discussed at IDCC
make it into practice
so watch this space!
Playing games!
Training is always a major IDCC theme,
and this year two of the most popular conference submissions
described games used to help teach
digital curation concepts and skills.
Mary Donaldson and Matt Mahon of the University of Glasgow
presented their use of Lego to teach the concept of sufficient metadata.
Participants build simple models
before documenting the process and breaking them down again.
Then everyone had to use someone else’s documentation
to try and recreate the models,
learning important lessons about assumptions and including sufficient detail.
Kirsty Merrett and Zosia Beckles from the University of Bristol
brought along their card game “Researchers, Impact and Publications (RIP)”,
based on the popular “Cards Against Humanity”.
RIP encourages players to examine some of the reasons
for and against data sharing
with plenty of humour thrown in.
Both games were trialled by many of the attendees
during Thursday’s Unconference.
Summary
I realised in Dublin that
it’s 8 years since I attended my first IDCC,
held at the University of Bristol in December 2011
while I was still working at the nearby University of Bath.
While I haven’t been every year,
I’ve been to every one held in Europe since then
and it’s interesting to see what has and hasn’t changed.
We’re no longer discussing data management plans,
data scientists or various other things
as abstract concepts that we’d like to encourage,
but dealing with the real-world consequences of them.
The conference has also grown over the years:
this year was the biggest yet,
boasting over 300 attendees.
There has been especially big growth in attendees
from North America, Australasia, Africa and the Middle East.
That’s great for the diversity of the conference
as it brings in more voices and viewpoints than ever.
With more people around to interact with
I have to work harder to manage my energy levels
but I think that’s a small price to pay.
	Iosevka: a nice fixed-width-font
Iosevka is a nice, slender monospace font with a lot of configurable variations. Check it out:
https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
	SSI Fellowship 2020
I’m honoured and excited to be named one of this year’s Software Sustainability Institute Fellows.
There’s not much to write about yet because it’s only just started, but I’m looking forward to sharing more with you.
In the meantime, you can take a look at the 2020 fellowship announcement
and get an idea of my plans from my application video:
	Replacing comments with webmentions
Just a quickie to say that I’ve replaced the comment section at the bottom of each post with webmentions, which allows you to comment by posting on your own site and linking here. It’s a fundamental part of the IndieWeb, which I’m slowly getting to grips with having been a halfway member of it for years by virtue of having my own site on my own domain.
I’d already got rid of Google Analytics to stop forcing that tracking on my visitors, I wanted to get rid of Disqus too because I’m pretty sure the only way that is free for me is if they’re selling my data and yours to third parties. Webmention is a nice alternative because it relies only on open standards, has no tracking and allows people to control their own comments. While I’m currently using a third-party service to help, I can switch to self-hosted at any point in the future, completely transparently.
Thanks to webmention.io, which handles incoming webmentions for me, and webmention.js, which displays them on the site, I can keep it all static and not have to implement any of this myself, which is nice. It’s a bit harder to comment because you have to be able to host your own content somewhere, but then almost no-one ever commented anyway, so it’s not like I’ll lose anything! Plus, if I get Bridgy set up right, you should be able to comment just by replying on Mastodon, Twitter or a few other places.
A spot of web searching shows that I’m not the first to make the Disqus -> webmentions switch (yes, I’m putting these links in blatantly to test outgoing webmentions with Telegraph…):

So long Disqus, hello webmention — Nicholas Hoizey
Bye Disqus, hello Webmention! — Evert Pot
Implementing Webmention on a static site — Deluvi

Let’s see how this goes!
	Bridging Carpentries Slack channels to Matrix
It looks like I’ve accidentally taken charge
of bridging a bunch of The Carpentries Slack channels
over to Matrix.
Given this,
it seems like a good idea
to explain what that sentence means
and reflect a little on my reasoning.
I’m more than happy to discuss the pros and cons of this approach
If you just want to try chatting in Matrix,
jump to the getting started section
What are Slack and Matrix?
Slack (see also on Wikipedia),
for those not familiar with it,
is an online text chat platform
with the feel of IRC (Internet Relay Chat),
a modern look and feel
and both web and smartphone interfaces.
By providing a free tier that meets many peoples’ needs on its own
Slack has become the communication platform of choice
for thousands of online communities, private projects and more.
One of the major disadvantages of using Slack’s free tier,
as many community organisations do,
is that as an incentive to upgrade to a paid service
your chat history is limited to the most recent 10,000 messages
across all channels.
For a busy community like The Carpentries,
this means that messages older than about 6-7 weeks
are already inaccessible,
rendering some of the quieter channels apparently empty.
As Slack is at pains to point out,
that history isn’t gone,
just archived and hidden from view
unless you pay the low, low price
of $1/user/month.
That doesn’t seem too pricy,
unless you’re a non-profit organisation
with a lot of projects you want to fund
and an active membership of several hundred worldwide,
at which point it soon adds up.
Slack does offer to waive the cost for registered non-profit organisations,
but only for one community.
The Carpentries is not an independent organisation,
but one fiscally sponsored by Community Initiatives,
which has already used its free quota of one elsewhere
rendering the Carpentries ineligible.
Other umbrella organisations such as NumFocus
(and, I expect, Mozilla)
also run into this problem with Slack.
So, we have a community which is slowly and inexorably
losing its own history behind a paywall.
For some people this is simply annoying,
but from my perspective as a facilitator of the preservation of digital things
the community is haemhorraging an important record of its early history.
Enter Matrix.
Matrix is a chat platform similar to IRC, Slack or Discord.
It’s divided into separate channels,
and users can join one or more of these
to take part in the conversation happening in those channels.
What sets it apart from older technology like IRC
and walled gardens like Slack & Discord
is that it’s federated.
Federation means simply that users on any server
can communicate with users and channels on any other server.
Usernames and channel addresses specify
both the individual identifier
and the server it calls home,
just as your email address contains all the information needed
for my email server to route messages to it.
While users are currently tied to their home server,
channels can be mirrored and synchronised across multiple servers
making the overall system much more resilient.
Can’t connect to your favourite channel on server X?
No problem:
just connect via its alias on server Y
and when X comes back online it will be resynchronised.
The technology used is much more modern and secure
than the aging IRC protocol,
and there’s no vender lock-in like there is with
closed platforms like Slack and Discord.
On top of that,
Matrix channels can easily be “bridged” to channels/rooms on other platforms,
including, yes, Slack,
so that you can join on Matrix and transparently talk to people connected to the bridged room,
or vice versa.
So, to summarise:

The current Carpentries Slack channels could be bridged to Matrix at no cost and with no disruption to existing users
The history of those channels from that point on would be retained on matrix.org and accessible even when it’s no longer available on Slack
If at some point in the future The Carpentries chose to invest in its own Matrix server, it could adopt and become the main Matrix home of these channels without disruption to users of either Matrix or (if it’s still in use at that point) Slack
Matrix is an open protocol, with a reference server implementation and wide range of clients all available as free software, which aligns with the values of the Carpentries community

On top of this:

I’m fed up of having so many different Slack teams to switch between to see the channels in all of them, and prefer having all the channels I regularly visit in a single unified interface;
I wanted to see how easy this would be and whether others would also be interested.

Given all this, I thought I’d go ahead and give it a try
to see if it made things more manageable for me
and to see what the reaction would be from the community.
How can I get started?

Reminder
Please remember that,
like any other Carpentries space,
the Code of Conduct applies in all of these channels.

First, sign up for a Matrix account.
The quickest way to do this
is on the Matrix “Try now” page,
which will take you to the Riot Web client
which for many is synonymous with Matrix.
Other clients are also available for the adventurous.
Second, join one of the channels.
The links below will take you to a page
that will let you connect via your preferred client.
You’ll need to log in
as they are set not to allow guest access,
but, unlike Slack,
you won’t need an invitation to be able to join.

#general — the main open channel to discuss all things Carpentries
#random — anything that would be considered offtopic elsewhere
#welcome — join in and introduce yourself!

That’s all there is to getting started with Matrix.
To find all the bridged channels
there’s a Matrix “community”
that I’ve added them all to:
Carpentries Matrix community.
There’s a lot more,
including how to bridge your favourite channels from Slack to Matrix,
but this is all I’ve got time and space for here!
If you want to know more,
leave a comment below,
or send me a message on Slack (jezcope)
or maybe Matrix (@petrichor:matrix.org)!
I’ve also made a separate channel for Matrix-Slack discussions:
#matrix on Slack
and Carpentries Matrix Discussion on Matrix
	MozFest19 first reflections
Discussions of neurodiversity at #mozfest
            ·
            
          Photo by Jennifer Riggins
            
      
    


The other weekend I had my first experience of Mozilla Festival,
aka #mozfest.
It was pretty awesome.
I met quite a few people in real life
that I’ve previously only known (/stalked) on Twitter,
and caught up with others that I haven’t seen for a while.
I had the honour of co-facilitating a workshop session
on imposter syndrome and how to deal with it
with the wonderful Yo Yehudi and Emmy Tsang.
We all learned a lot
and hope our participants did too;
we’ll be putting together a summary blog post
as soon as we can get our act together!
I also attended a great session,
led by Kiran Oliver
(psst, they’re looking for a new challenge),
on how to encourage and support a neurodiverse workforce.
I was only there for the one day,
and I really wish that I’d taken the plunge
and committed to the whole weekend.
There’s always next year though!
To be honest,
I’m just disappointed that
I never had the courage to go sooner,
	Music for working
Today3 the office conversation turned to
blocking out background noise.
(No, the irony is not lost on me.)
Like many people
I work in a large, open-plan office,
and I’m not alone amongst my colleagues
in sometimes needing to find a way
to boost concentration by blocking out distractions.
Not everyone is like this,
but I find music does the trick for me.
I also find that different types of music
are better for different types of work,
and I use this to try and manage my energy better.
There are more distractions than auditory noise,
and at times I really struggle with visual noise.
Rather than have this post turn into a rant
about the evils of open-plan offices,
I’ll just mention that the scientific evidence
doesn’t paint them in a good light1,
or at least suggests that the benefits are
more limited in scope than is commonly thought2,
and move on to what I actually wanted to share:
good music for working to.
There are a number of genres that I find useful for working.
Generally, these have in common
a consistent tempo,
a lack of lyrics,
and enough variation to prevent boredom without distracting.
Familiarity helps my concentration too
so I’ll often listen to a restricted set of albums for a while,
gradually moving on by dropping one out and bringing in another.
In my case this includes:

Traditional dance music,
  generally from northern and western European traditions for me.
  This music has to be rhythmically consistent to allow social dancing,
  and while the melodies are typically simple repeated phrases,
  skilled musicians improvise around that to make something beautiful.
  I tend to go through phases of listening to particular traditions;
  I’m currently listening to a lot of French, Belgian and Scandinavian.
Computer game soundtracks,
  which are specifically designed to enhance gameplay without distracting,
  making them perfect for other activities
  requiring a similar level of concentration.
Chiptunes and other music incorporating it;
  partly overlapping with the previous category,
  chiptunes is music made by hacking the audio chips
  from (usually) old computers and games machines
  to become an instrument for new music.
  Because of the nature of the instrument,
  this will have millisecond-perfect rhythm
  and again makes for undistracting noise blocking
  with an extra helping of nostalgia!
  Purists would disagree with me,
  but I like artists that combine chiptunes
  with other instruments and effects
  to make something more complete-sounding.
Retrowave/synthwave/outrun,
  synth-driven music that’s instantly familiar
  as the soundtrack to many 90s sci-fi and thriller movies.
  Atmospheric, almost dreamy,
  but rhythmic with a driving beat,
  it’s another genre that fits into the
  “pleasing but not too surprising” category for me.

So where to find this stuff?
One of the best resources I’ve found is
Music for Programming
which provides carefully curated playlists
of mostly electronic music
designed to energise without distracting.
They’re so well done that the tracks move seamlessly,
one to the next,
without ever getting boring.
Spotify is an obvious option,
and I do use it quite a lot.
However, I’ve started trying to find ways to support artists more directly,
and Bandcamp seems to be a good way of doing that.
It’s really easy to browse by genre,
or discover artists similar to what you’re currently hearing.
You can listen for free
as long as you don’t mind occasional nags
to buy the music you’re hearing,
but you can also buy tracks or albums.
Music you’ve paid for is downloadable
in several open, DRM-free formats for you to keep,
and you know that a decent chunk of that cash
is going directly to that artist.
I also love noise generators;
not exactly music,
but a variety of pleasant background noises,
some of which nicely obscure typical office noise.
I particularly like mynoise.net,
which has a cornucopia of different natural and synthetic noises.
Each generator comes with a range of sliders
allowing you to tweak the composition and frequency range,
and will even animate them randomly for you
to create a gently shifting soundscape.
A much simpler,
but still great,
option is Noisli
with it’s nice clean interface.
Both offer apps for iOS and Android.
For bonus points,
you can always try combining one or more of the above.
Adding in a noise generator
allows me to listen to quieter music
while still getting good environmental isolation
when I need concentration.
Another favourite combo is
to open both the cafe and rainfall generators from myNoise,
made easier by the ability to pop out a mini-player
then open up a second generator.
I must be missing stuff though.
What other musical genres should I try?
What background sounds are nice to work to?




See e.g.: Lee, So Young, and Jay L. Brand. ‘Effects of Control over Office Workspace on Perceptions of the Work Environment and Work Outcomes’. Journal of Environmental Psychology 25, no. 3 (1 September 2005): 323–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2005.08.001. ↩


Open plan offices can actually work under certain conditions, The Conversation ↩


Well, you know. The other day. Whatever. ↩
	Working at the British Library: 6 months in
It barely seems like it, but I’ve been at the British Library now for nearly 6 months. It always takes a long time to adjust and from experience I know it’ll be another year before I feel fully settled, but my team, department and other colleagues have really made me feel welcome and like I belong.
One thing that hasn’t got old yet is the occasional thrill of remembering that I work at my national library now. Every now and then I’ll catch a glimpse of the collections at Boston Spa or step into one of the reading rooms and think “wow, I actually work here!”
I also like having a national and international role to play, which means I get to travel a bit more than I used to. Budgets are still tight so there are limits, and I still prefer to be home more often than not, but there is more scope in this job than I’ve had previously for travelling to conferences, giving talks that change the way people think, and learning in different contexts.
I’m learning a lot too, especially how to work with and manage people split across multiple sites, and the care and feeding of budgets.
As well as missing mo old team at Sheffield, I do also miss some of the direct contact I had with researchers in HE. I especially miss the teaching work, but also the higher-level influencing of more senior academics to change practices on a wider scale. Still, I get to use those influencing skills in different ways now, and I’m still involved with the Carpentries which should let me keep my hand in with teaching.
I still deal with my general tendency to try and do All The Things, and as before I’m slowly learning to recognise it, tame it and very occasionally turn it to my advantage. That also leads to feelings of imposterism that are only magnified by the knowledge that I now work at a national institution! It’s a constant struggle some days to believe that I’ve actually earned my place here through hard work, Even if I don’t always feel that I have, my colleagues here certainly have, so I should have more faith in their opinion of me.
Finally, I couldn’t write this type of thing without mentioning the commute. I’ve gone from 90 minutes each way on a good day (up to twice that if the trains were disrupted) to 35 minutes each way along fairly open roads. I have less time to read, but much more time at home. On top of that, the library has implemented flexitime across all pay grades, with even senior managers strongly encouraged to make full use. Not only is this an important enabler of equality across the organisation, it relieves for me personally the pressure to work over my contracted hours and the guilt I’ve always felt at leaving work even 10 minutes early. If I work late, it’s now a choice I’m making based on business needs instead of guilt and in full knowledge that I’ll get that time back later.
So that’s where I am right now. I’m really enjoying the work and the culture, and I look forward to what the next 6 months will bring!
	RDA Plenary 13 reflection
Photo by me
      
    


I sit here writing this in the departure lounge at Philadelphia International Airport, waiting for my Aer Lingus flight back after a week at the 13th Research Data Alliance (RDA) Plenary (although I’m actually publishing this a week or so later at home). I’m pretty exhausted, partly because of the jet lag, and partly because it’s been a very full week with so much to take in.
It’s my first time at an RDA Plenary, and it was quite a new experience for me! First off, it’s my first time outside Europe, and thus my first time crossing quite so many timezones. I’ve been waking at 5am and ready to drop by 8pm, but I’ve struggled on through!
Secondly, it’s the biggest conference I’ve been to for a long time, both in number of attendees and number of parallel sessions. There’s been a lot of sustained input so I’ve been very glad to have a room in the conference hotel and be able to escape for a few minutes when I needed to recharge.
Thirdly, it’s not really like any other conference I’ve been to: rather than having large numbers of presentations submitted by attendees, each session comprises lots of parallel meetings of RDA interest groups and working groups. It’s more community-oriented: an opportunity for groups to get together face to face and make plans or show off results.
I found it pretty intense and struggled to take it all in, but incredibly valuable nonetheless. Lots of information to process (I took a lot of notes) and a few contacts to follow up on too, so overall I loved it!