Published 3rd June 2024

Can you describe your background and your current role?

At the moment my role is 50% directing the lab so that means mainly management, line management of the whole team – it is 13 of us, as well as different roles in committees, faculty, and liaison. 

Then the other 50% as an analyst, I’m the first point of contact with researchers that are interested in working with us. That might mean to work all the way from the early concept phase when a researcher might have an idea about a project and eliciting technical requirements. Then working to draft a funding application together, contributing to data management plans. If the project gets awarded, the role of the analyst is to be the continuity point in the project lifecycle, so you act a little bit as project manager and a little bit like a facilitator within the RSE team that works with the researchers. Usually in the lab the sub team means an RSE developer, RS UI/UX designer and an analyst. The analyst keeps track of the deliverables, milestones, priorities, and what else, and then sometimes we might contribute some research outputs, whether papers or other format.

Sometimes this role includes a little bit of training or holding some guest lectures with students, mentoring or supervising some students, but that’s a very minor part of the role. It’s really based on interest and expertise; I do quite a fair bit of outreach as well.

That’s interesting, you wear different hats and you’ve got these different formal roles. How do you identify?

I think the analysis role really fits my background and my expertise; these days I would never identify myself as a programmer, but I did do some programming in my career.

In the role of an analyst, I guess you can be more or less technical, but I definitely think that I identify myself in that role of facilitating the research, enabling the research, at the same time I do realise that a lot of that shapes, that in the end it makes what the research ends up to be as well. 

You have a support role, but as we all know, these support roles in the end make the research as well, right? I remember when I joined the lab and our ex-director was very keen on pushing the research software engineering label, I was a little bit sceptical about it at all, because it is too narrow or would imply that all of us have an engineering degree or background, but actually I started to see more and more the importance of that label. If you do make it more inclusive and you do realise that there are different levels of contribution, the label can be very beneficial exactly to professionalise those roles that are in research and technical domains.

In the plenary session earlier, the term RSX was floated. What do you think of that? 

I liked that somebody commented that the label “RSE” has been useful. If the community continues to really clarify that within RSE, you have all these different roles and that they all contribute to research in different ways and make research better, then I don’t care if the label stays potentially quite narrow.  But we do have to make an effort. In general, The inclusive processes around the format of the conference clearly are going in the right direction. And personally, I also think the arts, humanities and social sciences disciplines that are less represented in RSE are definitely going in the right direction. At some point the Society focused on RS, and the E was kind of minor, so the research software label, I think, that might be a useful way of continuing to picture it.

So what was your journey into your current work?

For the equivalent of high school in the UK, I did classics, but with a computational, maths and physics curriculum, it was very strange. Even though I chose classics, I was better at maths and the computational parts, or rather they came easier to me. When I went to university, I found this path, the generic title was communication sciences, but I chose the computational linguistics degree within it. So my degree already had quite a lot of technical elements in it, even if it came from the humanities. And then I did a PhD in manuscript and book studies, I collaborated with engineers already during my BA and then for my PhD. I worked with the customization and use of some software to do image processing for ancient manuscripts, tracing the shape of letters, the provenance and the dating, using a tool and integrating it into traditional humanities methods. In the last year of my PhD, I found out that there was a very big humanities computing community and decided to then come to King’s [College London] and do a master at King’s, I got a scholarship and things became a little bit more networked in the sense that I wasn’t alone anymore. This community developed into what is now, digital humanities. 

I worked in research for a while in the humanities and have a long experience in collaborative projects. But I also had a window in my career where I worked as a research facilitator and that I think gave me a bit of an outlook also on funding that then became useful when I kind of came back into working in universities and academia again.

So you do have a PhD?

I do have a PhD, the title of the PhD is Book and Manuscript Studies. I worked with engineers at the National Center of Research in Italy. They had developed a beta version of software for polygraphic analysis or analysis of ancient handwriting. I was assessing this tool and using it in a real case study. I played the researcher there, already interacting with the developers and software. I wouldn’t say that I then used that PhD to do a lot of research in manuscript studies, it was for me a kind of methodological PhD, if you like. 

In your own team, how do you consider PhDs? Do you consider that good, bad, neutral? Is it just different? 

In our team, I think only two of us have a PhD. So it’s not essential at all for the role. I do think that there are some benefits sometimes in working with researchers, if you have an exposure to that research domain, and you’re working on specific areas or some of us are. But this is valid also if you don’t have a PhD; there are people that don’t have a PhD, but worked a lot in geospatial analysis and therefore they acquire the language, the expertise and so on. Therefore, they normally work with researchers in those kinds of projects. So I don’t think PhD in that sense makes a difference. 

Obviously, it’s different if you want to lead your own research project, but again, RSE is a  spectrum; a research project could be very experimental and doesn’t have to lead to a traditional academic output. In the lab, definitely, we’re very open. You can have the desirable criteria for the job, especially for the senior ones, i.e. that you have a certain number of years of experience which may include a PhD.

What is your favourite thing about your work and being an RSE?

I’d probably say two things. 

One is when we work well together, so the collaborative element.  The puzzle pieces really come together well and you achieve something, a little bit like being in a choir or a play. You have that sense of “we did it together”. Obviously, in that journey, there might also be moments of failures, moments of frustrations, but when things work, I think that’s when I feel the most motivated.

The other aspect is also when you do work with researchers that have really interesting areas they work on, really passionate about their subjects and you see that some of your work makes a difference and they recognize that. It’s one of the good things about working in academia. In general, people do it not because, I don’t know, they need to earn another million but it’s because they really care about the specific area and subject and so that passion drives things.  I don’t teach much, but I know that you can get quite a lot of sparkle and enthusiasm from working with students.

As someone who’s in a leadership position, who’s going to come through lots of different ways and who manages lots of different research software people, what advice would you give to someone looking to move into leadership roles? Maybe particularly in digital humanities, that’s a very unique part of your work.

I think first of all being able to delegate and trust the team you work with. In my mind, I always see this as a leader-servant model. That you’re there to really facilitate others to grow and others to give their best rather than achieving KPIs. Obviously, you also have to have some strategies. 

I think listening to what are the strengths and weaknesses in the team. Try to find a space for people to grow personally and also as a team, that’s not always easy.

The other thing is also not to get discouraged because especially in our areas, the recognition of some of those roles is still low. So be proud of what you do and try to not get frustrated or discouraged when you see, for instance, some peers that might not treat you as a peer or not respect you enough. Sometimes  you do end up in a so-called support role when you identify yourself as support. So if you actually are professional in what you do, people recognize your  professionalism.