Gretchen
Stahlman

Gretchen Stahlman investigates the social, technical and institutional infrastructures that mediate scholarly communication and long-term management of scientific data. Her work incorporates a mixed-methods approach including interviews and workshops, survey research, bibliometrics and text analysis.

Gretchen Stahlman’s present research aims to identify and characterize datasets associated with published journal articles, and with a particular interest in data that are not currently discoverable by other researchers. While this work is applicable across domains and will be extended in future research, her dissertation project has focused on the discipline of astronomy as a case study for exploring questions such as:

• Who are the researchers most likely to create and/or possess undiscoverable datasets, and what are the significant attributes and locations of these “dark data”?
• Why are some data not made available to other researchers, and how can potentially-useful dark data be identified and rescued?
• What are the individual, system and data characteristics that facilitate deposition and reuse of data?

To address these questions, Stahlman participated in grant proposal writing and project activities for NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure development, while engaging with the scientific community through a series of workshops, targeted interviews, a survey of authors of papers published over several decades, and assessment of a corpus of journal articles. The overall purpose of her present and future work is to inform open science and scholarly communication initiatives, as well as development of new methods, services and infrastructures for long-term data curation and information retrieval.