Start of the WiNoDa Knowledge Lab

What inspired you to join WiNoDa, and what specific goals are you pursuing within the project? 

Fabian Riebschläger (FR): “Archaeology has traditionally placed a high value on digital documentation and the appropriate handling of the recorded research data. Archaeological research in the form of excavations is usually invasive. Contextual information can only be collected once. Any information that is not documented and stored in a sustainable way is lost for further research. At the same time, archaeology relies on interdisciplinary approaches. This applies in particular to the use of methods from the natural sciences, which in turn place their own subject-specific demands on digital data management and computer-aided analysis. In addition, with the FAIR principles, the scientific community now has fundamental requirements for research data management. So far, the skills needed for this have not been sufficiently taught in university programmes. I hope that WiNoDa will help to close this gap and support both archaeologists and natural scientists in meeting the challenges of highly interdisciplinary and digital research.”

Sonja Potter (SP): “The motivation lies in the mission statement of the WiNoDa project: the networking of the scientific community and a large number of institutions under the umbrella mission of supporting the community of interest to the best of our knowledge and belief in the acquisition of specialised knowledge through learning opportunities and the provision of information.”

Alex Miklashevsky (AM): “My background is in cognitive science and experimental psychology, but I’ve always been drawn to multidisciplinary approaches. That’s why I’m so passionate about statistics and data science – they`re like a universal language that lets different fields communicate with each other. What particularly excites me about the WiNoDa Knowledge Lab is the chance to collaborate with people from natural sciences, data science, and the humanities, and to learn something new from them every day.”

Ben Kaden (BK): “Our motivation as the Vernetzungs- und Kompetenzstelle Open Access Brandenburg to participate in WiNoDa is twofold. On one hand, we aim to make the topic of Open Science more visible and simultaneously establish it as a permanent component in the research data competence trainings. In doing so, we want to prepare and convey our field of expertise, namely the areas of Open Access and Open Science, in the best possible way for the target group, thereby strengthening Open Access and Open Science step by step.
On the other hand, in our work outside of WiNoDa, we have so far primarily addressed actors from research infrastructures, especially university libraries. With WiNoDa, the opportunity arises to expand our focus and also engage directly with researchers. We are not taking this step entirely altruistically. Naturally, we also want to continuously develop ourselves and hope to gain new experiences and insights from participating in the project that we can generally utilize for our work.”

Barbara Ebert / Anna Lisa Schwartz (BE/ALS): “We are very excited to be part of WiNoDa because this project perfectly aligns with the goals of GFBio e.V.: facilitate access to valuable data and to support the scientific community. At GFBio e.V., we are currently further developing the association’s services and reaching out to new target groups.
WiNoDa is particularly exciting for us because it focuses on collection data. With a strong partner like the MfN at our side, which is also a member of GFBio e.V., we can achieve a lot.
For the association, we see this project as a great opportunity to expand our reach. We aim to specifically engage collection curators and data stewards in natural science collections and develop tailored training offerings for them. WiNoDa will also enable us to integrate valuable materials for the management of biological, object-related data into our knowledge management and thus provide even better support for our members.”

How do you see the significance of WiNoDa for the broader scientific community and society?

FR: “The countless objects recorded in natural science collections are essential for researching the history of the Earth and of mankind. They can be used to answer fundamental questions about past living conditions and to make forecasts for future environmental changes. To achieve this, comprehensive digitisation of existing research data, sustainable management of that data and digital recording of the objects themselves are essential. WiNoDa will help to impart the necessary skills in this field and enable new, innovative research. At the same time, WiNoDa will promote scientific discourse and networking with society and business.”

SP: “WiNoDa fulfils the approach that has long been initiated to bring together the knowledge of the individual scientific disciplines, networking it and making it available to the community. All under the Open Science approach, which I wholeheartedly support.”

AM: “Data is growing at an incredible rate, and today, it’s considered one of the most valuable resources. This digital shift isn’t just about the data stored on servers or hard drives somewhere; it’s about empowering people like you and me to make use of that data. It’s crucial that future professionals – no matter the field – know how to work with data, understand them, and use them to inform the public and guide us in making decisions based on facts rather than guesswork. There are many initiatives out there teaching data literacy, and WiNoDa is a small but significant part of that movement.”

BK: “Contemporary research is data-driven, even when it doesn’t carry labels like “data science” or “research data”. Every scan of a research object, every assignment of provenance information, every annotation represents a datafication. This means that for modern research, one must also understand what happens regarding those processes. Consequently, all researchers need application and reflection skills in dealing with data. How this materialises is determined on one hand by the specific disciplines themselves and will hopefully sooner rather than later become a central element of every methodological training. However, there are also general requirements that are constantly and sometimes disruptively updated, for instance Artificial Intelligence.
We understand WiNoDa as bridging the gap between the specific and general requirements for data competency profiles, in this case for object-centered research. If we are successful, we will not only raise the competence level of the community but also produce results that can be well reused by actors outside this community. That’s why we have planned from the beginning to make all materials produced in the project available in Open Access or as Open Educational Resources.
An important facet is also the interaction between science and society, which is reflected in phenomena such as Citizen Science or Public Engagement. This opening of academic structures is a core element of Open Science. Not everyone will be a scientist in the professional sense. But everyone with interest should be able to participate in science. Digital technologies and datafication enable completely new solutions and, in principle, a global reach. WiNoDa also imparts the necessary skills for this under the keyword “Public Engagement”.”

BE/ALS: “From our perspective, WiNoDa has the potential to improve access to important data that often remains unused in scientific collections. This data can contain very important information about the past and provide new insights – a valuable contribution to science and beyond. We very much hope to help motivate researchers to work with this data.”

What unique expertise does your institute bring to WiNoDa? Could you describe a particular challenge you’ve faced in the project and how your institute’s specialisation helped overcome it?

FR: “The German Archaeological Institute (DAI) contributes its expertise in the field of object-centred archaeological and natural scientific research to WiNoDa. The focus here is on digital documentation in the field and object digitisation, as well as on the analysis of collected data using computer-aided methods. A particular challenge here is the merging and contextualisation of the respective data from different specialist disciplines. The DAI has been working for several years on solutions to counter this problem in the context of expanding its information infrastructures. It will contribute the knowledge gained to WiNoDa.”

SP: “VZG is responsible for providing the infrastructure and supporting the project with the developed services. With a developer and an internal project coordinator, we support WiNoDa throughout the entire duration of the project and until the processes are stabilised. The subsequent utilisation of internal project developments for new or subsequent projects is a major concern for us.”

AM: “The Museum für Naturkunde Berlin is one of the key contributors and beneficiaries of the WiNoDa Knowledge Lab. It’s an incredible institution – a collection of collections – with millions of objects. Digitizing these objects creates vast amounts of data. The experts working with these data are tackling big questions about the history of our planet and humanity. I hope the WiNoDa Knowledge Lab can support them by boosting their data skills and providing the tools they need to work with these data effectively.”

BK: “The Vernetzungs- und Kompetenzstelle Open Access Brandenburg serves as an expertise hub for Open Access in the federal state of Brandenburg and at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. The scientific director of the Vernetzungs- und Kompetenzstelle, Prof. Dr. jur. Ellen Euler, LL.M., also conducts research on Open Science in a dedicated professorship for Open Access and Open Data. Open Access and Open Science have now become traditional research topics in library and information science.
As with many specialized topics, the transfer of knowledge beyond the boundaries of one’s own professional community remains a challenge. With WiNoDa, we now have the opportunity to reach researchers directly. One issue, however, is how to present the complexity of the topic in a way that neither underwhelms nor overwhelms the audience. We are well aware that Open Science elements are just one of many facets of data competence training. Therefore, we need to find a way to connect the aspects important for Open Science with other elements and convey them appropriately to the target. To develop an appropriate design to communicate Open Science concepts for object-related research data in the given setting will also be a learning curve for us. We are very much looking forward to this. Indirectly, WiNoDa is thus also a small library science research project.”

BE/ALS: “GFBio e.V. contributes comprehensive expertise in the management of biological and environmental data as well as a strong network, in particular the GFBio data centers. As the managing partner of an NFDI consortium for biodiversity research, we ensure that synergies are utilized and duplication of work is avoided.
One challenge will be designing training sessions for complex data science topics. Thanks to our experience with Winter Schools for NFDI4Biodiversity, we have been able to actively engage our network of experts. We are now planning a Winter School for 2025 under the leadership of WiNoDa.”

How do you see the future of WiNoDa? What long-term impacts do you hope to see from the project?

FR: “I hope that WiNoda will establish itself as a place of learning, research and networking beyond the actual project period and thus make a decisive contribution to research into the history of the earth and humanity. I also hope that insights from the development of the data competence centre will be taken up by university teaching and that sustainable research data management and a profound knowledge of the use of digital methods in research will become an integral part of the curriculum.”

SP: “The future of WiNoDa is that it will become a matter of course within the knowledge community to make internal knowledge, new research content and best practices available to researchers and the public in a timely manner and to collect, network and make them available on a central platform. The project is already working towards this and all disciplines, including those beyond the natural sciences, should benefit from it.”

AM: “I think a lot of people get nervous when they hear terms like data science, statistics, data visualization, or artificial intelligence. It sounds to them really complicated – like something only experts in those fields can understand. But that’s not true! Anyone can learn the basics, keep up with the latest developments in data science, and use them to tackle their own challenges. Even better, you might discover new, more efficient ways of working or start asking questions that just weren’t possible before. WiNoDa’s long-term goal is to help shift that mindset in the research community, showing that data science can be fun and exciting to learn and apply.”

BK: “The central challenge of such projects is, as is well known, sustainability. The project duration allows for the collection of best practices and lessons learned, which can then be transferred into a kind of permanent operation. Digital forms of research will continue to evolve, as do Open Access and Open Science. Hence, the corresponding training and teaching materials, and certainly the teaching concepts themselves, must be continuously updated. If a mode for this can be found, then WiNoDa, along with the other data competence centers, will create an infrastructure that ensures a very high level of data competence in the German research landscape.
Particularly the junior researchers who use our training will take this knowledge with them on their future career paths. The better they are trained and the more they can apply these competencies, the more not only their own research benefits, but also that of their peers and project groups, and thus also the generations of researchers to follow. The WiNoDa community is therefore not only a beneficiary of the inital program but will itself become a long-term multiplier for research data competencies.”

BE/ALS: “At the moment, we want to lay the foundation for the Knowledge Lab – with courses, training programs, and a platform for research data. From GFBio’s perspective, it will be very important to build a user community that is interested in the Knowledge Lab.
In the long term, we hope that by exchanging ideas with users, we can develop practical training sessions that provide new impetus for data usage. The goal is to continuously develop these offerings and expand them in collaboration with the NFDI consortia.
Through our engagement with users, we hope to develop exciting, application-oriented training programs that inspire new approaches to data usage. In the future, we hope to further develop and expand these offers in close cooperation with the NFDI consortia.”