Study Data Curation in Arts and Media Research
10/26/2010
Costs: free
Author: SURFfoundation/ Universiteit Leiden
This report, Data Curation in Arts and Media Research, surveys the current situation regarding the management and reuse of research data in art history, comparative arts research, and media studies.
Summary
The study was based on a survey of the literature and a series of interviews with representatives of three types of interested parties:
1. researchers in the field of art history, comparative arts research, and media studies;
2. institutions involved in managing scholarly data;
3. scholarly publishing houses that are interested in publishing scholarly texts in combination with research data.
Three types of research products
Researchers create three types of product in the course of their research. Research in the disciplines concerned often focuses on objects that are managed by heritage institutions such as museums, libraries, or archives. If an object is not yet available in digital form, researchers can decide to create their own digital reproductions. They also create research data, for example databases, spreadsheets, or transcriptions of survey results. Files of this kind generally comprise qualitative or quantitative data about the objects studied. Analyses are carried out on the basis of this type of data and ultimately recorded in publications.
Sharing research data offers benefits
The researchers interviewed in the framework of this report emphasised that sharing research data offers clear benefits:
- If the data is managed by an external party, the researchers do not need to put time and effort into the work of preserving it. If the data is freely accessible, other researchers can make use of it.
- In the longer term, this allows more large-scale or more comprehensive research projects to be carried out. Data can also be used in ways that were not envisaged at the point when the data was produced.
- If research data is archived systematically, researchers can more effectively verify the assertions and conclusions in publications.
At the moment, it is not yet usual for researchers in the field of arts research and media studies to reuse research data produced by other researchers. Researchers do not have an effective overview of the data files created by other researchers. Researchers are generally not prepared to share their data before they have produced a publication based on it. They are generally assessed on the basis of their publications, but making data files available does not in itself produce any clear reward.
In general, one can say that researchers have a positive attitude towards sharing research data. The availability of large quantities of data on the Internet clearly offers new scholarly possibilities.
Proposal for a procedure for managing research data
This report also puts forward a proposal for a procedure for managing research data. The “life cycle” of data commences at the point when it is produced as part of a research project. Metadata descriptions should be allocated as soon as possible after the files have been created.
This study is one of three carried out in the framework of SURFfoundation’s SURFshare programme. The studies focus on how to determine what research data should be preserved for the long term and what data should not. The three studies are:
• Data Curation in Arts and Media Research (Leiden University)
• IISH Guidelines for preserving research data: a framework for preserving collaborative data collections for future research (IISG)
• Selection of Research Data; Guidelines for appraising and selecting research data (DANS and 3TU).
A brief summary of the three studies is available as well as a checklist “General Guidelines for Selecting Research Data to be Preserved”.
SURFshare_Collectioneren_Data_Curation_in_Arts_and Media_Research_DEF.pdf