Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies News

Purdue Libraries Associate Professor Michael Witt Awarded Pufendorf Fellowship

November 27th, 2017

Purdue University Libraries Associate Professor Michael Witt has been awarded a visiting research fellowship at the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) at Lund University in Sweden, where he will spend a month as a part of a sabbatical during the Spring 2018 semester.

According to the Pufendorf IAS website, it hosts international experts on different themes that revolve around one or more current research issues. Witt will participate in the “DATA” theme, which incorporates five distinct threads that relate to archiving vanishing languages, data visualization, text mining, creating astronomical catalogs, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Witt’s research focuses on the application of library science principles to the management and curation of research data.

“The DATA theme is taking an integrated, interdisciplinary approach that includes the university library as a partner and incorporates library science as a fiber that could potentially be woven into all of its five threads,” Witt said.

The aim of his sabbatical is to gain a better understanding of data repositories and to promote the practice of using data repositories, in particular, in underrepresented disciplines and geographic regions of the world, Witt noted.

“One way of increasing the impact of research is to share the underlying datasets that support the findings in an appropriate repository and make them available to other researchers to reproduce the results and to repurpose the data for new research,” he added.

Witt, who is also the head of the Distributed Data Curation Center (D2C2) in the Research Data unit of Purdue Libraries, will begin his six-month sabbatical in February.

The Pufendorf IAS is named after Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-1694), a philosopher and a faculty member at the 350-year-old Lund University.

Witt is featured on the Pufendorf IAS website at www.pi.lu.se/en/activities/theme-data/michael-c-witt and in a video profile at www.pi.lu.se/article/videoportratt-av-tema-datas-gastforskare.