Report on an Internship at the King's Digital Lab
Hello readers!
My name is Fiona Wijaya. At the start of July, 2024, when I was a second-year student studying Digital Media and Culture in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, I started my full-time internship on metadata analysis for strategic research planning as a project management intern at the King’s Digital Lab; my tasks and responsibilities included: reviewing and updating metadata on past projects; creating dashboards to inform strategic decision-making; and assisting with document editing. Within this blog post, I would like to share my experience at King’s Digital Lab and extend my gratitude to Pamela Mellen, KDL’s Research Software Lab Manager, and Alessandra Esposito, KDL’s Research Software Project Manager, for guiding me throughout the internship.
During the first week of the internship, I was tasked to update metadata across the Lab’s digital legacy estate projects to create reports that would enable the Lab to analyse its project portfolio since its inception in 2015. The updated metadata about projects across the Lab’s portfolio included information on funding applications, funding size, cost recovery and strategic engagement with partners, which would later be translated into reports to assist in strategic decision-making, e.g. which types of funding proposals and potential partners to focus on. In addition to that, I was able to attend a meeting to learn about how the lab utilises GitHub to edit and monitor the KDL website. I initially found it challenging to grasp how branches, commits, and pull requests worked together - concepts I had heard of before but never had the chance to apply. However, with guidance from the team at King’s Digital Lab, I gradually became more comfortable navigating GitHub and using it as part of my workflow. Though utilising GitHub was difficult after a 2-hour meeting, the experience boosted my technical confidence and sparked an interest I hope to continue developing beyond the internship.
After updating and organising a substantial amount of project metadata, I started building comprehensive dashboards using ClickUp, the Lab’s project management tool. I built a new Retrospective Dashboard and revised the existing Portfolio Dashboard. The Retrospective Dashboard helps identify trends, e.g. relationships between project size and success rates, set realistic KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), distinguish areas of strength and weakness, and demonstrates statistics, such as the number of applications and successful funding awards with different departmental and faculty partners. The Retrospective Dashboard then feeds into discussions within the Lab, and with senior internal stakeholders and potential partners. Meanwhile, I created the Portfolio Dashboard to bring information from various reports into one place and ensure it is well displayed, enabling all team members to efficiently access and understand the comprehensive information displayed. Both reports were created to improve data visualisations, making them clearer and more professionally presented; this way when stakeholders approach KDL and ask KDL to present statistics about past projects, it will be easier for the Lab to access and present this information. In creating these dashboards I encountered many trials and errors that I then needed to figure out how to address and determine what worked best, and which functions would efficiently show what was needed. As an intern, I wanted to be as helpful as I could. The feedback so far is that these dashboards have helped KDL provide important historical context for strategic planning, reduce redundancy and enabled new Lab staff to understand the Lab’s internal workings better.
My last tasks as an intern involved updating the existing Research Excellence Framework (REF) Checklist for Digital Outputs Assessment and the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) wiki for wider public viewing.
The REF checklist was designed and publicly published online for wider use, to help judge the quality of a digital output, usually created by those in the higher education institution sector across the United Kingdom. As described in KDL Director Arianna Ciula’s 2019 blogpost, “What Makes Good Honey?”:
While researchers in all disciplines have developed refined mechanisms to peer or self-assess ‘traditional’ research outputs, when it comes to digital outputs, it is often unclear what assessment criteria to apply. The Digital Humanities community has reflected on this issue and published papers and reports even if not directly in the context of the REF. The KDL checklist attempts to systematise, update, adapt and enhance these efforts. While designed specifically to help colleagues prepare for the UK's REF exercise, then, we hope it could end up being useful to colleagues elsewhere too.
For this task, I supported the Director by streamlining essential updates and co-writing the updated guidelines, which will inform colleagues in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London, and potentially beyond, on how to assess their digital outputs when determining what to submit to the REF. The guidelines outlined in the document are written to encourage more submissions of digital outputs and help broaden the recognition of diverse research outputs. These works have a wider impact on understanding what kind of research is valued which, in the long run, will impact research funding, academic promotions and the variety of research people engage in. Meanwhile, the SDLC wiki refers to the methodology of the Software Development Life Cycle which is often used by labs, partners, and developers to understand the process of creating a software development project. The purpose of the wiki is to share best practices by providing examples related to KDL’s SDLC from pre-project to post-project. I made internal changes and ensured information regarding the SDLC was up to date and reflected the current standards of the Lab.
Looking back at the internship, I want to highlight the two main things I learned from the experience. Firstly, I gained knowledge on how higher education institutions produce digital outputs, and contributed to it by co-writing an updated the REF checklist. Lastly, I gained a greater understanding of the internal workings of the Lab, enabling me to understand more what a project management role entails, which I believe will be valuable in my career path moving forward. To end this blog post, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisors, who were not only kind and helpful to me during the internship, but whom I had the opportunity to learn from. Thank you for the experience, Pamela, Alessandra, and everyone at King’s Digital Lab!