As the research lead for our project, at this stage of the project I have also de facto become the data manager. Our data management class was very timely, as this past week I researched and collected our initial database of NYC fridges and began cleaning the data. It was useful to think about the process more structurally. Most helpfully it helped to consider file naming conventions as I was working on the different categories of information and think about questions like who will see the data, and how accessible it needs to be

Thinking about data management also underlined that collecting, cleaning the data, or naming conventions we need to consider our final product and what our chosen platform (Omeka) can do and what it needs from our database. It also inspired some research for additional resources on data management and I found this worksheet from Caltech Library that might be helpful to other groups in the class. In the next stages of data work, this process will be more collaborative with our wonderful developer lead (Senom), and I am very much looking forward to that stage of this process after thinking about all these questions together this week.