Fellow Detail

My interests are software citation and software sustainability, their relationship, and the different aspects of each. This includes software metadata, software visibility and accessibility, technical and human/community/DIE aspects of sustainability, but also the application of software engineering methods in research contexts (think Research Software Engineering).

I have a background in the humanities, and hold an MA in English literature and language, modern German literature, and linguistics from the Free University Berlin, Germany. I am currently a doctoral researcher in software engineering at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in the Institute for Software Technology's Sustainable Software Engineering Group, and the computer science department at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In my PhD work, I look into making research software dependencies more visible by determining their impact on the dependent software, for the sake of both recording provenance, and more credit for research software developers. I am also the PI of the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration project HERMES, where we work on automating workflows for publishing software with rich metadata.

My interest in research software sustainability stems from first-hand experience working in RSE roles (which weren't called that at the time) in a number of different fixed-term linguistic research projects, and as freelancer for digital humanities software projects. It was firmly consolidated at the WSSSPE4 workshop in Manchester in 2016, in the wake of which I became a founding member of the German RSE community, and later inaugural board member of de-RSE - Society for Research Software.

In 2017, I suggested and co-initiated the Citation File Format (CFF), a machine-readable file format for software citation metadata. CFF, which I co-lead, is integrated in platforms such as GitHub, Zenodo, Zotero and others, and helps software authors make their research software citable, and researchers cite the software they use. As a Special Collaborator, the SSI supported me in developing the format and run CFF community events.

I'm a certified Carpentries instructor.