2024 Year in Review

I started doing an annual review last year after being inspired by a few others doing something similar ( Crystal Steltenpohl, Cara Thompson, and Shannon Pileggi). While writing this review provides an opportunity for me to slow down and reflect on everything that has happened this year, I also want to share it with others to acknowledge the vast support system of people I have in my life, and to provide others a glimpse into the life of a freelance research data management consultant (in case you were curious)!

So without further ado, here are some highlights from the year!

1. I worked on a variety of impactful data management projects with 8 different clients. The projects ranged from curating data for sharing purposes, to building data collection and tracking tools with a focus on data quality, to consulting with researchers on best practices for creating documentation templates for new projects. I also provided an 8 hour (4 session) data management overview workshop for a research team and received enthusiastic feedback on the workshop. I’ll be giving this same workshop series to a new team in January 2025!

Figure 1: Feedback from my data management workshop

2. 2024 was the year I finally submitted the paperwork for my LLC, Crystal Lewis Consulting! Becoming an LLC provides some legal protections and legitimacy to my business and it felt good to make this happen!

3. I published my first book, Data Management in Large-Scale Education Research, with CRC Press! This book is a tool-agnostic guide for learning how to effectively manage data throughout the entire life cycle of a research project! Writing this book was a passion project for me and it felt good to complete the project after working on it for the last 2.5 years. To date, over 100 copies of the book have sold, but the open-access book remains freely available online and has been accessed by many more people.

I am very grateful to everyone who has taken time to share the book with others, as well as those who have shared reviews on social media and on sites such as Amazon and Goodreads! Also a huge thank you to Randy Au who recently reviewed the book in his Counting Stuff newsletter. In his review he notes that the latter half of the book is useful for anyone doing complex data collection, even for seasoned practitioners in fields outside of education.

Figure 2: A customer review of the Data Management in Large-Scale Education Research on Amazon

4. I continued co-organizing two community groups.

• POWER Data Management Hub (3rd year co-organizing)
  • I’m thankful for my co-organizers, Gizem Solmaz-Ratzlaff, Rebekah Jacob, and Callie Little 🙏
  • We held multiple meetups this year, including having 4 invited presentations
  • We published our first guest post on the OSF blog
  • We continued to add new resources to our OSF landing page
• R-Ladies St. Louis (4th year co-organizing)
  • My awesome co-organizers included Jenine Harris, Laura Rose, Mary Painter, and Shelly Cooper 🙏
  • We held multiple meetups, including two in-person meetups (a first since the pandemic)!

5. I was asked to be one of five instructors for a workshop series as part of an NIH grant awarded to Jessica Logan (Vanderbilt University) and Sara Hart (University of Waterloo). Being a part of this grant has been a dream come true. It has allowed me to work closely with a team of data management gurus (Jessica Logan, Sara Hart, Tara Reynolds, Jeffrey Shero, Chris Schatschneider, and Willa van Dijk), and also spend one week a year (for the next 4 years) teaching data management to small groups of developmental science researchers on the beautiful Vanderbilt campus. This year’s workshop was a blast and I so enjoyed both teaching and learning from the entire group.

Figure 3: On the left, Crystal Lewis presenting on documentation. On the right, Jessica Logan presenting on DMPs.

6. I was honored to be a part of several speaking engagements this year.

• The Center for Open Science invited me to give an online book talk and almost 200 people joined the presentation.😳
• I was invited to give an in-person workshop at NCME in Philadelphia on Data Cleaning for Data Sharing Using R.
• David Keyes, with R for the Rest of Us, invited me to be a guest on his podcast to talk about how I use R in my work.
• I was invited to give a presentation on my freelance journey to the QQPM Seminar at the University of Nebraska.
• I was invited as a guest speaker for a Q&A with the BIOS2 community call.

Figure 4: Presenting at NCME in Philadelphia.

7. Besides my book, I continued to try my best to find time to create additional helpful content and materials.

• This year I wrote 3 new blog posts. One of the posts was even picked up by Hacker News and made it into the top 10. 🤯
• I continued to add to and refine the materials in my supplemental materials OSF repository, as well as update materials in my sample data sharing OSF repository.
• I continued to update and add to my #rstats data wrangling examples wiki.
• This happened to also be the year of memes for me. I created and shared several memes to help bring awareness to data management issues while also having some fun with it.

8. Last, but definitely not least, I did my best to make time to intentionally connect with and learn from others in this space, including other freelancers, data people, and education researchers. See a recent LinkedIn post where I acknowledge some of these people.

I want to give a special shout out to Libby Heeren for continuing to organize the Data Freelance Collective, a Slack Workspace and community for data freelancers to support each other through referrals, answering questions, sharing resources, and sometimes by just being someone who listens.

As for 2025, I have a busy spring ahead of me. I’m bringing on one new client, while continuing to work with the five teams I am currently working with. Three researchers have written me in as a consultant in their grant proposals, so if those are funded, I’ll have some additional new work starting up in the fall as well. I’m very fortunate to continue to stay busy but I am always open to bringing on new clients. If you are looking for help with data management in 2025, you can contact me here!

Outside of client work, I also hope to get back to posit::conf this year. It’s one of my favorite conferences and I’d love to see all of my #rstats friends in person. I plan to continue working with my co-organizers to plan new events for both R-Ladies St. Louis and the POWER Data Management Hub. I also hope to find time to write all of blog post ideas I have in my head, while also trying to talk myself out of writing another book (I have an itch to write a book titled Data Cleaning for Data Sharing Using R). 🤪

Last, I want to continue supporting others in any way I can (i.e., referrals, sharing resources, sharing experiences, etc.). If you are a freelancer, data person, or researcher, and want to connect, please reach out!

Happy New Year, everyone! And if 2025 is the year that you want to improve your data management practices, just remember…..