Presentation made by Rebecca Grant as part of the panel session “Digital data sharing: the opportunities and challenges of opening research” at the Digital Humanities conference, Krakow, 15 July 2016. This paper “DH research data: identification and challenges” provided an introduction to concepts of research data in the digital humanities, including accepted definitions of what constitutes research data in a DH context.

1. Digital data sharing: the opportunities and
challenges of opening research panel discussion
DH research data: identification and challenges
Rebecca Grant, Digital Archivist, Digital Repository of Ireland
Doctoral student, Archivistics Department, UCD

2. Research data publication and Open Access
Image: "Digital Preservation Business Case
Toolkit http://wiki.dpconline.org/".
• A global initiative which has gained traction since the 2000s
and rise of the Internet
• Promoting the concept that the outputs of publicly funded
research should be accessible publicly for consultation and
reuse
• Influences policy for higher education
institutions, journal publishers, and funding
agencies

3. Drivers in research data publication
• Universities – enhancing reputation and researcher profile through
data publication and citation.
• Funders – preventing duplication of effort in research, contributing to
the public good.
• Journal publishers - reproducibility, rigorous research methodologies.
Journals published by Taylor and Francis, such as World Archaeology and
The Journal of Visual Art Practice suggest the deposit of accompanying
research data with submitted publications.

4. What is research data?
“A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continually
extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be
consulted”. Vannever Bush, Atlantic Monthly, 1945.
[f]aced with massive data, this approach to science —
hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. Chris
Anderson, Wired, 2008.
“Raw and abstracted material created as part of research
processes and which may be used again as the input to further
research”, An Introduction to Humanities Data Curation

5. What does Digital Humanities research data include?
Images, sound, AV, text, performances, exhibitions, archives, publications,
logbooks, journals, linguistic corpora, musical scores, geospatial datasets, virtual
reality and CAD files, mixed media installations; digital models, algorithms,
scripts; contents of an application (input, output, log files for analysis software,
simulation software, schemas)..
The subject OR the product of research
“The first step... is achieving consensus over what research data comprises,
and the forms it takes. In the sciences this first step is relatively
straightforward and reasonably well described; however this is not always
the case in the creative disciplines” Pinning it Down

6. Why is humanities data different?
Text corpora: markup representing linguistic, grammatical, vocal, or semantic
categories; documenting the principles of corpus construction
Text with markup: XML languages (eg TEI) representing document structure, editorial
annotations, and also aspects of content such as named entities, intertextual
references, and thematic or interpretive information.
Data with accompanying analysis or annotation “primary” digital object (such as an
image, a map, a virtual 3-D reconstruction) which has been enhanced with
annotations or analysis.
Finding aids, bibliographies with formal structures
https://guide.dhcuration.org/contents/intro/
Specialised data aggregations which have significance in and of themselves

7. Why is humanities data different?
•The significance of interpretive layering - interpretation as the
primary object of interest
• The importance of information about how the data is
captured and prepared – documentation of decisions affecting
usability and meaning
• The importance of capturing responsibility, editorial voice,
and debate - These layers represent scholarly agency and as a
result are subject to debate
https://guide.dhcuration.org/contents/intro/
Important to acknowledge when treating the data:

8. DANS – “Dutch Love Emblems” website
https://easy.dans.knaw.nl/ui/datasets/id/easy-dataset:33856

9. VADS - Royal College of Art Record of Student Work Collection
http://www.vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=161245&sos=0

10. Oxford Text Archive – Corpora collection
http://ota.ox.ac.uk/catalogue/index.html

11. Digital Repository of Ireland – Teresa Deevy Archive
https://dx.doi.org/10.7486/DRI.95944c09k

12. Bibliography
Budapest Open Access Initiative, http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/, accessed 8
July 2016
Garrett, Leight and Marie-Therese Gramstadt. ‘KAPTUR: exploring the nature of visual arts
research data and its effective management’. EVA LONDON 2012 Electronic Workshops in
Computing (2012), pp 88-96.
Guy, Marieke, Martin Donnelly and Laura Molloy. ‘Pinning it Down: Towards a Practical
Definition of ‘Research Data’ for Creative Arts Institutions’. International Journal of Digital
Curation 8, no. 2 (2013), pp 99-110.
Flanders , Julia and Trevor Muñoz . ‘An Introduction to Humanities Data Curation’,
https://guide.dhcuration.org/contents/intro/, accessed 8 July 2016

13. @beck_grant
r.grant@ria.ie
beck.grant@gmail.com
www.dri.ie
The content of this presentation is licensed as CC-BY unless otherwise stated. Please attribute
to Rebecca Grant, Digital Archivist, Digital Repository of Ireland, 2015.