Conflicts and complexities on the path to open data by Prof Louise Connell

About the talk

Even with the best intentions and motivations, sharing your data in an open repository is not always as easy as it should be. Barriers can appear in a variety of forms, including uncertainty regarding copyright and data ownership, diverging interpretations of GDPR and ethical issues, and sheer lack of time and resources to curate your data into a shareable format. I discuss some ways my collaborators and I have navigated these barriers and share some tips and tricks for making the process as painless as possible.

About the speaker

My research interests surround cognitive science and embodied cognition. Specifically, I’m interested in how mental representations and conceptual knowledge are grounded, how we access and use these representations in language, and how we can create computational models to better understand human cognitive behaviour. I use a range of interdisciplinary methods from experimental psychology and cognitive modelling to corpus linguistics and machine learning. Some recent work has examined how sensorimotor experience (i.e., what we sense via different perceptual modalities, what we do via different action effectors) underpins word meaning, how distributional statistics from language capture important information about conceptual and social knowledge, how information about space and time is mentally represented, and how people combine concepts into new entities.