Job opportunity and validator follow-up!

[Melissa Kline]

Dear all, 

tl;dr summary - 

(1) job ad! 

(2) next steps on validator

*****

As some of you may already know from other channels, I will be going on parental leave in early 2023. In order to keep things running on some of my major projects - including Psych-DS - we are hiring for a short-term position at MIT (December 2023-Summer 2024).  This Community Specialist position will support the day-to-day operations of these projects, which involve working with researchers to facilitate their projects, project management with the Psych-DS/CHS team, and working with MIT administrative staff to keep things running smoothly. The full-time version of this position will also have time dedicated to more in-depth projects related to the candidate's interests, so this could also be an opportunity for someone who might be interested in putting in some significant work on the validator! A full job description can be found here.

To apply, please send an email directly to mek...@mit.edu with a cover letter, CV, and the contact information for two professional references. (References will not be contacted until after candidate interviews.)  Candidates should apply as soon as possible, with review expected to begin November 13th. Please note - despite all of my efforts, MIT rules mean that this job is only open to people who are both able to work, and physically located (anywhere in) the United States. 

*****

Thanks to those of you who were able to meet last week! We've now had a chance to do some cleanup on the repositories, and start setting up some more specific roadmap plans in light of those discussions. Brian is off to the races implementing the LinkML core  (essentially, this is a machine-readable implementation of the Psych-DS specification document.)

Here's a brief summary of our planned upcoming work; if you are interested in getting involved in any part of this, please get in touch!  

- The major remaining piece of work on the LinkML core is the JSON-LD schema.org/Dataset validation piece. In addition to implementing what we need for the current schema, we also need to establish plans for versioning & future schema.org updates. Issue: https://github.com/psych-ds/psych-DS/issues/28

- We will be building a ReadTheDocs website that automatically creates documentation pages from the LinkML files; this will let us keep things up to date and version controlled as we test and update the schema during validator building and testing. In addition to building the automatic pipelines, we will also need to write human-readable explanations and documentation, beginning from the existing "big google doc". Initial issue: https://github.com/psych-ds/psych-DS/issues/32 

- This will also involve "de-accessioning" the big google doc - making sure that all of the information currently in that draft makes it into the new official documentation of Psych-DS in an accurate and comprehensible form. If you have ideas for ways to implement this process or would like to help, chime in on this issue: https://github.com/psych-ds/psych-DS/issues/29

- A key resource for both building the validator, maintaining it over time, AND ensuring it's usable for researchers is a healthy collection of example datasets. Right now, we have a handful that have been manually updated to (various versions of) Psych-DS, but we expect that these will need improvements as we start to have actual validation available (!)  If you have datasets you'd like to contribute, or can help with setting up example datasets that are freely available but not yet Psych-DS formatted, see this repo for instructions: https://github.com/psych-ds/example-datasets

- If you have tools that either already exist and should interface with Psych-DS, or that you would like to build, please let the community know! This goes also if you have ideas, questions, or things you'd like to work on that weren't mentioned anywhere above. You can do this by checking out the issue list to see if there are any related topics, and/or creating a new issue here: https://github.com/psych-ds/psych-DS/issues

Thanks to everyone who has already contributed to Psych-DS - this is an exciting time, and all the work you've put in to discussions and work on the specification draft are what's making this possible!

- Melissa

--

Melissa Kline Struhl

Lookit Executive Director

Research Scientist, MIT Brain & Cognitive Sciences

mek...@mit.edu

https://lookit.mit.edu/

http://www.melissaklinestruhl.com/