Ayoung Yoon Presentation

Ayoung Yoon, assistant professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, will give the talk, "Toward Community Inclusive Data Ecosystems: Opportunities and Challenges for Data Curation."

Abstract: While the benefits of data for helping to address societal problems and strengthen communities are well recognized, previous studies found that smaller communities are often excluded from the current data ecosystem because of existing technological, technical, cognitive, and practical barriers. This presentation will introduce a project called Data Reuse for Local Community, a three year project funded by IMLS, which goal is to support community members’ equitable data reuse by facilitating their connection with existing resources and data infrastructure. In order to address the goal, this study aims to investigate the community members’ data reuse practices focusing on the opportunities and challenges for data curation. Using an interpretive qualitative approach, this study conducted a semi-structured phone interview with 45 participants from local community members. The findings suggest different types of social impact that data reuse brought to the communities with four major challenges that inhibit communities’ data reuse, and the role of data intermediary organization to address those challenges. While these findings demonstrate that data reuse support community-led actions and initiatives from the bottom-up perspective, the findings also suggest proper data curation support is the key to make these communities data reuse successful. Three major opportunities for addressing these challenges are also emerged, particularly by creating educational programming, building partnerships within data ecosystems, and bringing community voices forward in current data ecosystems, which are critical to realizing data’s potential for all citizens.

Ayoung Yoon is an assistant professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing (IUPUI), Department of Library and Information Science. She was an RDA/US data share fellow for 2016-2017. She holds a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and MSI from the University of Michigan. She is a founding member of Data to Action Lab in SoIC, IUPUI and serves as a director during the founding year, 2018-2019. Her research uniquely intersects the fields of data curation and archival science, and has been focusing on exploring how data curation can support equitable data reuse and how community’s data reuse capacity can be enhanced through proper data curation support. Her research has been funded by Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Alfredo Sloan Foundation, Indiana University New Frontiers in the Arts & Humanities Program, and IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute. 

Questions? Contact Lori Kelso