Kristin

I’m obsessed with sewing beaded broaches. My latest is an amanita mushroom. I worked out it this morning when the kids were playing and I finished the front. 😍

I'm trying to find guidelines for writing alt text for chemical structures and the Google Scholar search for "alt text chemical structure" is embarassingly bad. The top 9 results show up because of the text: "alt text is not available for this image," which is just layers of awful. #accessibility #a11y

I finished drafts of all ten chapters of my new book! A few of them are really rough drafts but this is still a big milestone. Now I get to edit for the remainder of the year. #writing #author

I just published a new libguide on research data #accessibility: https://library.caltech.edu/data-accessibility

I am very open to constructive criticism. There's limited guidance on this topic and most of it applies to business documents and not research data. I would love to improve the guide based on feedback!

#dataManagement #a11y #research

One of the joys of writing a book is being able to cite your friends’ books in your writing.

It’s publication day! 🎉

“The Data Management Workbook” is now available. If you’ve ever wanted to improve your data management but don’t know how, this is the book for you. It contains 24 hands-on exercises to customize data management strategies to fit into your research workflows. I hope you find it useful!

https://pelagicpublishing.com/products/the-data-management-workbook

If you know me, you know that I'm the person who always advocates for the consistent and descriptive naming of research data files and using ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD). I even created a well-loved worksheet for this: https://doi.org/10.7907/894q-zr22

Except... I think we need to use a different strategy for naming shared data: shorter and clearer is better. More on the blog at https://dataabinitio.com/?p=1281

I'm honored to appear in Nature for the third (!) time this academic year, this time talking about the data deluge: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00880-7

I'm so pleased to see Nature covering such important data topics and it was lovely to discuss them with journalist Sarah Wild.

I can't believe that my new book, The Data Management Workbook, comes out in less than 2 weeks.

I'm very grateful to Christie Bahlai for writing this wonderful endorsement for it. Christie is not only a great scientist, but also an advocate for data management and open science.

I’m looking forward to testing out this new data broker data deletion portal that is newly available to all California residents. It expands upon a previous law that allows for data deletion but makes it easier by providing a centralized request portal instead doing requests one-by-one.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/data-broker-hoarding-is-rampant-new-law-lets-consumers-fight-back/

This #LoveDataWeek, I'm thinking about making our shared data more accessible. This involves rethinking the README.txt as the default recommended documentation file.

Is there a better file format that .txt? I've written up a few thoughts: https://dataabinitio.com/?p=1235

I just finished teaching the Responsible Conduct of Research course, the class in which I debuted the original version of The Data Management Workbook a couple years ago. Very fitting on the publication date of the book.

I love introducing grad students to file naming conventions, ISO 8601, the Archive folder, and so many of my other favorite #DataManagement strategies. 🥰

I have lots of feelings about the DMSPs templates that will be implemented next week by the NSF and next month by the NIH:

+ potential for easier compliance for everyone (researchers, agencies, and more)
- the roll out of the new templates has been problematic

My thoughts: https://dataabinitio.com/?p=1250

@dsalo@digipres.club I'm sorry to share that there's another of your "favorite" type of article: https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2026.a983014

RE: @dantheclamman@scicomm.xyz

As if we don't have enough issues with image manipulation in science, we now add AI to the picture.