Developing a website always seems fun and cool until you’re sitting there with about 100 tabs open on your web browser trying in vain to figure out how to do something simple like center some text on the page, after having spent hours battling dependency errors and just trying to work out the file structure of the theme you’re using earlier that day.

Excuse me while I scream.

Yelling at computers aside though, this week did bring a lot of progress, even if it was hard fought. Programming is inherently an unpredictable pursuit. When you write something, the words usually come out as you expect them too (unless you’re writing on a really messed up keyboard). Writing is just a matter of figuring out exactly what you want to say and how to say it. Literally putting the words on paper is the easy part. But when coding, you can know exactly what you want to do and how, and you can still be foiled by something tiny you overlooked somewhere. Making a typo when you write? It’s fine, maybe someone will laugh at you a little, but that’s the worst that’s going to happen. Making a typo in code? Whoops, the whole thing might not run now!

So yeah, coding can be frustrating. Especially when you have to do it with a deadline. But! When you do finally get something that works and looks cool, then it’s a great feeling,  like you’ve reached the light at the end of a long and spooky tunnel.

Of course, sometimes the light is a trap. Anglerfish are known for lurking deep in the dark zones of the ocean, shining their lights like beacons. And when small fish draw near, eager for a little light and warmth – the anglerfish chomps down on them. In horror, this kind of twisting of expectations is common. One example of this that we’ve encountered repeatedly in this project is horror around motherhood. Stereotypical depictions of mothers paint them as nurturing and loving. This is an image that stems from the expectations placed onto women to manage the household and remain devoted to their children above all else, even while the children’s father might go out to work and barely see the kids. But as Barbara Creed’s feminist horror archetypes show, motherhood can also frequently be scary. According to Creed, the figure of the mother in horror can represent a primal terror that seeks to consume what it once birthed, a manipulator molding her children in her image and using them for her gains, or a progenitor of evil who births monsters, willingly or not. These archetypes, though still pushing women into narrow boxes in some sense, also push back against the idea that women love being mothers and are happy to suppress their own senses of self for the purpose of caring for their children. It takes this in the extreme opposite direction, by showing us mothers who want to kill and consume or use their children as tools. And that last archetype, what Creed calls the “Monstrous Womb”, depicts women who give birth to terrors they may not want. I can imagine seeing horror like that being quite cathartic to women who were pressured into motherhood or who felt there was something wrong with them for not feeling only positive and nurturing things toward their children. Because sometimes even normal kids can be like monsters, and the depiction of the monstrous womb legitimizes that feeling for women typically expected to just be docile and happy.

Anyway, that post went all over the place. I guess my conclusion is this. Your kids might act like monsters. The websites you make might crash. No matter how much mothers are traditionally depicted as kind and perfect carers for their children, or hackers are depicted as techno-magicians who can effortlessly get computers to do what they want – in reality, there’s always the chance of something going wrong, of terror to befall you no matter how hard you work to fit into your designated role. It’s just another way that it’s interesting to explore horror as an exaggeration of the mundane.

The website is working though! For now. The terror of debugging will return though, no question about it.

I have to confess that this week got away from me, and I ended up being much busier with my day job and thwarted my plans to steam company time and join Sasha’s skill share session, a GitHub and VSCode walkthrough that would prove foundational to our data curation efforts further down the line. But Sasha was generous enough to record the session and include the links into our shared documents, so I am all set to walk myself through the workshop and touch base with questions for her next week. All of this to say the first data-management technique I need to apply to everything I do, is keeping a better calendar!

All jokes aside, from some creative coding classes and working in an editorial context where a piece of writing goes through as many as four versions, each of them shared among multiple parties and requiring strict version control, I had picked up on a few tricks over time: Smarter file naming conventions, copies spread out across multiple sources and locations, documentation (README’s especially), version control. But Steve Zweibel’s Research Data Management presentation was so useful I saved the link to all my workspaces. Just having access to the language of data management — types of research data (by origin or form), data life cycle, FAIR principles, etc. — gave some purpose and unification to what have long been a set of haphazard practices I use to work.

When I think about data degradation, I am more likely to think about link rot or bit rot, the actual deterioration and degradation of the mechanisms of saving information. But Michener’s “Data Entropy” diagram charts how distance from data’s original context and the people who created it are factors that data management is meant to mitigate. We take pictures, keep scrapbooks, memento boxes, travel souvenirs, and ask our elders to rehash the same stories so we can keep that immediacy that binds us to source of information. Like links, bits, and pictures, any form of data collection is subject to deterioration. So in truth, link rot is not too different from dry rot and in both cases, “future you is your first user.”

“Data management” initially evokes a mind image that illustrates the act as simply saving a bunch of documents into a personal computer. Of course, this idea is miniscule to the actual process of data management which significantly entails organization. The act of organizing is not solely reflected by files being recognizable to an individual’s physical memory though. Rather, naming files and documents should be completed in a manner that indicates the specificities of the information found inside. From the standpoint of historical research, data management mostly includes organization of sources and other material that will be used in studying and publishing scholarship. The definition of data management expands, however, when engaged in a digital project that entails website creation.  

Entering the AI Hallucinations project as Research Lead has pushed me to figure out what and how data management will look from my end. While that means searching for relevant sources and helping my teammates do the same, that also means taking note of “hallucinations” and decisions made when performing research to verify a fact or falsity. Granted, I do not have to maintain the compatibility of digital material. Yet, a “hallucination” in historical fact could be anything – possibly – which points to an objective facilitation of misunderstood history. It is a specific detail that I, and the rest of the research group, will eventually have to study in order to gain further insight into knowledge errors generated by AI software.  

Last semester during one of the Intro to DH discussions, probably on archiving or something related, I recall mentioning my interest in personal digital archiving. Given that I work in a library and make library software, it’s natural to assume I have my own house in order on this front. I wouldn’t characterize it as “in order” so much as “here’s some stuff I’ve thought about and some stuff I practice”. It’s true true that I have maybe more tools and established practice at hand, but I think that, like most anyone else, I live in fear that something in this Rube Goldberg contraption of overlapping cloud and local copies of stuff, there’s a piece missing that I can’t see.

The concept of data hygiene comes from data collection practices, which those of you who have constructed datasets may have encountered. Within this practice, its main purpose is to ensure data is clean, consistent, organized, and well presented. As a practice, it represents an ongoing activity rather than a single event, something you have to revisit from time to time as a means of protecting that data.

Within the context of data management more generally, I see it as encompassing more than just the transactional quality of the data and its continued fit for purpose. Fundamentally, you can’t use data you can’t access. So in my view data hygiene must include ensuring continued accessibility of the data. That’s why so much of the Data Management Plan centers around where the data will be stored, what measures you will take to ensure that you can access it, and to ensure that some casual disaster doesn’t wipe it out.

Okay so I don’t have a Data Management Plan for my own personal data. I could, I suppose. I suspect I know people who have or would love to make such a thing. I am not one of those people, despite my weird spreadsheets I use to track things only I’m interested in. But I’m just paranoid enough about data loss that I have some tools and some practices.

Perhaps the best encapsulation of those tools and practices is the Calibre Web server I run for myself. It houses the 25 gigabytes of tabletop role-playing game materials (mostly PDFs) I’ve collected to date. Its goals include collecting, then later being able to find those materials. I search it regularly. And yet it’s still a mess of incomplete metadata and half-baked tagging and organization systems. I would need a dedicated project to properly catalog all of this material. And it’s not backed up regularly in part because I can theoretically re-create it.

Elsewhere, of course, I have extensive collections of notes, photographs, documents, and more specialized files residing in folders created by art and music programs. I have a handle on only some of these, mostly the notes and photographs, which are regularly backed up via paid cloud services, and which I open regularly, occasionally migrate elsewhere, and otherwise keep at hand.

Is this sufficient? In looking at the contents of a Data Management Plan, and knowing what I know about business continuity and disaster recovery, I suspect it’s better than nothing, but insufficient. At the very least, going through the exercise of creating the plan gave me a chance to reflect on my own practices.

One thing that stuck out to me from last class’s presentation was the quote: “Future you is your first user.” It’s easy to get lost in the muddle of guidelines and standards, the confusion of what you think you’re supposed to be doing. But imagining yourself coming back in 10, 20 years – or heck, even just a few weeks,  and trying to figure out what in the world you were doing makes data management a lot easier to understand. What can you do to make life a little easier for your future self? What- when you’re looking at other’s projects, do you wish existed to explore the core data that went into their work?

Many horror stories somehow involve navigation. Whether a haunted house, a creepy forest, or an abandoned building, horror tends to evoke some fear of the unknown, exemplified by shadowy places where you can easily get lost if you aren’t careful. So what’s a poor, terrified horror protagonist to do? One old reliable strategy is to create a path so you can return the way you came. This is what Hansel and Gretel did by leaving breadcrumbs so they could find their way back after escaping an evil witch who tried to cook and eat them (a fairy tale? yeah, no that is absolutely a horror story).

And leaving that path – including planning in advance how you will leave it – is kind of what data management is about!

Using data management as a way to primarily orient yourself within your project might seem kind of a selfish approach – after all the types of organization methods that instinctively make sense to you won’t always be easily comprehensible to others. But leaving a trail for your future self is just the first step. Once you know that everything is planned, organized and documented so you can jump right back in after a break or distraction, it’s a lot easier to expand from there. If you prefer sharing data on GitHub but a teammate prefers Google Drive, then great, it’s easy enough to copy data to another platform, so long as you make a point to keep all copies of the dataset in sync. If a data dictionary Excel spreadsheet works perfectly as a way for you to make sense of your data, but you’re presenting to a group full of visual learners, then you can create a visual aid. And it will be a lot easier to have a spreadsheet that makes perfect sense to you to pull from when making that visual aid than if you just used the raw dataset. Basically, what I’m saying is that if you start with a data management plan that makes life easier for you, it becomes a lot easier to start making life easier for anyone else who may want to use your data. Because having done the thing that makes it all make sense to you, you’re now coming from a place of understanding, understanding that you can share.

Maybe for you it’s breadcrumbs you leave, for someone else it’s a thread, or markings on trees, or a sequence of landmarks memorized by heart. It doesn’t matter how you learn the route through the scary unknown, because once you learn it, it’s known and significantly less scary, and you can teach it to other people too.

A fun tangent: While refreshing my memory on the breadcrumbs in Hansel and Gretel, I came across this page, which ties the concept to web design: https://www.syntagm.co.uk/design/articles/breadcrumbs.htm. This is something worth keeping in mind if we do end up with multiple pages on the site – ensuring users can easily return to the home page if they end up elsewhere from a search. Fun how sometimes silly metaphors loop back around to being relevant to the original thing that spawned them!