Transcript Introduction to research data management - a humanities case study Slides provided by DaMaRO Project, University of Oxford Research Services.

Introduction to research
data management
- a humanities case study
Slides provided by DaMaRO Project,
University of Oxford
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Services
The researcher

Helen Redgrave, a doctoral student in the
Department of History
 Explored the emotional experience of ageing in
mid 20th century Britain
 Looked particularly at the interactions of social
researchers with research subjects
 Re-analysed historic social research data from
four social research projects conducted
between 1937 and 1965
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The dataset

Four major datasets, comprising interview
summaries, field notes, personal observations,
questionnaires, photographs, etc.
 Some material accessed by visiting archives
 Some available for download from UK Data
Archive and the Mass Observation Online
database
 A total of 749 files of research data, mostly in
PDF format
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Storage and back-up strategy

Working data stored on personal laptop
 Daily back-ups made to external hard drive
 Weekly back-ups made using University of
Oxford’s HFS back-up service
invaluable when laptop crashed – allowed
data to be retrieved easily
 Proved

Researcher would also have like to put a copy
on Dropbox, but the dataset was too large
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File naming strategies – examples


Order by date:

Order by type:
1955-04-12_notes_MassObs.docx
Notes_Gorer_1963-12-15.docx
1955-04-12_questionnaire_MassObs.pdf
Notes_MassObs_1955-04-12.docx
1963-12-15_notes_Gorer.docx
Questionnaire_Gorer_1963-12-15.pdf
1963-12-15_questionnaire_Gorer.pdf
Questionnaire_MassObs_1955-04-12.pdf
Order by subject:

Forced order with numbering:
Gorer_notes_1963-12-15.docx
01_MassObs_questionnaire_1955-04-12.pdf
Gorer_questionnaire_1963-12-15.pdf
02_MassObs_notes_1955-04-12.docx
MassObs_notes_1955-04-12.docx
03_Gorer_questionnaire_1963-12-15.pdf
MassObs_questionnaire_1955-04-12.pdf
04_Gorer_notes_1963-12-15.docx
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File naming strategies
In retrospect I am not very happy with the method I
used for naming files. The biggest problem was with
the newspaper articles I downloaded… I named the
files only based on the topic of the article, without
mentioning the name of the periodical and the year
of publication, which would have been very useful
later, when I began writing the thesis.
– Doctoral student researching communication history
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Metadata – data about data

A formal,
structured
description
of a dataset
 Used by
archives
to create
catalogue
records
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Data preservation and sharing plan

As the researcher was working with pre-existing
datasets, she did not own the rights – so was
not able to publish the data used
 However, the data is already publicly available
via the archives she obtained the material from
 Hence in this case, further use of the data could
be facilitated by pointing other researchers to
the material (e.g. by references in publications)
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Rights and re-use

This slideshow is part of a series of research data management
training resources prepared by the DaMaRO Project at the
University of Oxford
 It is based on information about real research projects provided
by the academics who worked on them – though names have
been changed, and case studies may have been edited,
amplified, or combined
 The slideshow is made available under a Creative Commons
Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike License
 Within the terms of this licence, we actively encourage sharing,
adaptation, and re-use of this material
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