Don’t chase citations. I know we are supposed to publish frequently, and in the right places. But meaningful collaborations with good colleagues have brought me far more, in terms of career progression and personal satisfaction, than getting a paper into a high-profile journal. And don’t discount alternative venues for publications. A thoughtful post in a good science communication blog is not only a great way to raise your profile to a broad audience – it’s also likely to be much more fun to write.

Next up is our Fellow Rebecca Kahn, REWIRE’s digital humanities specialist researcher who works at the Department of History. This interview provides insight not only into the multifaceted post-doctoral working life of a historian but also touches upon the challenges faced when digitising heritage materials. Rebecca also reveals one of her most favourite discoveries of her stay in Vienna so far and why she believes that different forms of publishing can be helpful for promoting one’s academic career.


Describe your research in one sentence.

Rebecca: One sentence is tricky – I’ll try and keep it short! I work on museum object records – the administrative and descriptive documents which tell the stories of every object in a museum or archival collection, and the ways in which we reuse and reproduce them as part of the digital data ecosystem.

Tell us about a normal day in the life of a postdoc.

Rebecca: They really are all different, although they all involve staring at a computer screen for most of the time. Some might be taken up by meetings with colleagues and collaborators, to work through some technical questions, or on a joint publication. Others are very quiet - my favourites are the ones I set aside for reading or messing around with data. For example, at the moment I am working on a collection of data related to the distribution and display of human remains in large online collections. On those days, I will be looking at the data, sorting it, using various tools to try and see patterns or themes which might emerge. The only real constant is that by about 3pm my brain usually can’t do hard thinking, so afternoons tend to be my admin time.

How will society benefit from your research?

Rebecca: We are only just beginning to explore the potential uses for the huge amounts data that are coming online from museums around the world. They can tell us an enormous amount about society at the time they were created, from global weather conditions recorded in the ships logs stored in maritime museums, to new research that become possible when scattered documents are reunited in virtual collections. But there are some risks involved in this datafication of heritage materials. Artificial Intelligence researchers, for example, are increasingly turning to these collections as a source of data for training their algorithms. But as any curator will tell you, museum or archival collections are not neutral spaces – all collections have deliberate inclusions and omissions, and were collected under specific conditions. Without making allowance for this, there is a risk that the algorithms repeat the biases in the collections. And no computer has the capacity for contextual reasoning yet – so data scientists need to work with curators to ensure that there is nuance in the final product.

#researchgonewrong: Share a funny/surprising or unexpected anecdote with us from your academic career so far:

Rebecca: It didn’t happen to me, but one of my professors told me about a mummified mouse that he found in a collection of papers at the British Museum. Nobody could be sure if it was an actual artefact that had been misplaced and mislabelled, or just a mouse that had crept in and died a lonely death in among the boxes… archivists have the best stories.

What does REWIRE mean to you?

Rebecca: Incredible freedom. It is such a luxury to have this amount of time and space to do my work. Very few postdocs have this kind of breathing space. It has also meant that I am part of a cohort of smart women, who can be truly supportive of each other. Because although we might all be at similar stages, and working through similar challenges, none of us are competing with each other, and that makes things so much easier!

Who is your personal heroine?

Rebecca: This is hard. I don’t think I have one single heroine. I grew up in South Africa in the 1980s, so was surrounded by women who were fighting against an unjust system – they were factory workers and academics, domestic workers, mothers, nuns and teachers. But the threads of decency and dignity and humanity united them. I always think about them, when I remember that we are all more than our jobs and families – we’re part of bigger systems.

The most important lesson learned so far that you want to share with other future (female) early post docs:

Rebecca: Don’t chase citations. I know we are supposed to publish frequently, and in the right places. But meaningful collaborations with good colleagues have brought me far more, in terms of career progression and personal satisfaction, than getting a paper into a high-profile journal. And don’t discount alternative venues for publications. A thoughtful post in a good science communication blog is not only a great way to raise your profile to a broad audience – it’s also likely to be much more fun to write.

Quickfire Questions

Keyboard or Pen?

Both! Pen (and a good notebook) for the first round, then keyboard to make sense of the scribbles.

Vanilla or chocolate ice cream?

Vanilla. With a drizzle of “Kürbiskernöl”, one of my favourite Austrian discoveries.

Early bird or night owl?

Early bird. The morning hours are always the most productive, even if it is a struggle in the winter months.

Find more information on Rebecca's research here.