To celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on 11 February 2022, we talked to Eleftheria Tsoupra, Technical Analyst at Europeana and member of the Saint George on a Bike project. Among other things, in this interviews she talks about her profession and the challenges she encountered pursuing her career, and the importance of encouraging encourage girls and women to choose a career related to science and make them more visible in this area.
What is your profession and how long have you been working in this area?
I am a Digital Curator with a background in History. I started working in this area right after I got my Masters in Digital Curation, so I have been working in this profession for the last five years now.
In 2017 I started working as an intern at DANS, a Dutch repository for research data. During this 6-month internship, I researched the use of Dutch oral history collections by analysing the log data from the DANS repository using Python. Right after completing my internship, I was hired there as Junior Policy Advisor. During this time, I worked on a research project related to the FAIR Data Principles and my main role was to evaluate the DANS repository based on these principles.
In 2018, a position for Data Ingestion Specialist opened at Europeana so I was hired in this role and worked with Europeana’s data providers and their cultural heritage collections for 3,5 years.
Finally, in 2021 (during the pandemic) I got the opportunity to join Europeana’s R&D team as a Technical Analyst and to support the team’s involvement in the Saint George on a Bike project.
Why did you choose this profession and what motivated you to do it?
Since I finished my diploma in History, I tried several things (e.g. teaching humanities to secondary education students, expanding my knowledge in Art History, Pedagogy and the education of people with special educational needs etc.), while in parallel I kept researching current trends in the field of humanities, keeping my own professional growth in mind. For several years, I was looking for a master’s program that fit me and my background. I wanted to find an innovative program and one that would secure a good job for myself.
When I found the masters in Digital Curation, I knew that this was the best program for me. Firstly, because I had, over time, developed a particular interest in investigating how digital (or otherwise computational) methods could support and enhance humanities research. Secondly, based on the research that I had done, I felt that Digital Curation had a key role to play in this field and in domains associated with the management of information such as libraries, archives and other memory and cultural heritage institutions.
During my postgraduate studies, I also got to know in which organisation I wanted to grow since I had courses about Europeana and the Europeana Data Model and some of my lecturers were part of the Europeana Network.
Have you encountered any challenges in pursuing your career?
Although personally I am very lucky to be part of an organisation like Europeana which is committed to principles of equal opportunities, I know that there are still many challenges women face when trying to pursue their careers.
To elaborate on this, many cultural forces continue to stand in the way of women, ranging from being underrepresented in leadership roles or having difficulties negotiating a pay raise because of gender bias, to the potentially career-stalling effects of having children, to sexual harassment in the workplace, which is of course the most extreme but unfortunately it hasn’t been eliminated yet.
Nevertheless, I really believe that nowadays, compared to the past, it is easier and more likely that women can succeed in their career, if they are motivated and sincere about doing some great work.
What is your contribution to the Saint George on a Bike project?
My main contributions to the SGoaB project so far is defining the use cases and requirements relevant for the project, supporting the development of the project’s services, gathering more data that can be used for training and testing the object detection model and making sure that this data is accompanied with provenance information so that it can be shared in research platforms and elsewhere. In addition, I have contributed to defining the requirements and testing the campaign that the project plans to launch for crowdsourcing image descriptions and to sharing information about the project’s progress and findings with stakeholders and wider audiences.
Do you think Saint George on a Bike can contribute to society? In what way?
If Saint George on a Bike manages to develop AI tools that help to better contextualise cultural heritage objects, especially those that currently lack this kind of metadata, or tools that help detecting bias in the already existing metadata, this, I think, can have a very positive impact. First, by making culture more findable and reusable, and second, by making culture less biased in terms of interpretation.
Additionally, if the project succeeds in generating image descriptions that could be used as alternate tags (alt text) for images, this can be very beneficial to people with visual impairments by improving the accessibility of these images.
The International Day of Women and Girls in Science is celebrated on 11 February. Do you think it is important to encourage girls and women to choose a career related to science and make them more visible in this area? Why?
Yes, I do think it’s essential to encourage girls and women to choose a career in science - which is historically perceived as not appropriate for their gender - for the simple reason that it is better for both women and society.
The problems which science tries to solve affect everyone, and so should reflect a diverse input. However, the decisions on what to solve and for whom things are designed still have a lot to do with who is doing the research, and in many cases, this is still mostly men. The gender gap persists (see maths-intensive fields such as computer science and engineering) and there is data proving that this has a negative impact on research outcomes.
To conclude, I believe that as more women get involved in science - or any field historically dominated by men - the general knowledge in that field tends to expand and this can only be beneficial for both women and society.
What message would you give to women who want to pursue a professional path related to science?
To remain open to developing all of their scientific talents - even if they come to realise how unusual it is for a woman to choose that path and how lonely it might be - as there has never been a better time (compared to the past) to be a woman in science.
