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Introduction to research data management- a humanities case study
Slides provided by DaMaRO Project, University of Oxford
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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 Proved invaluable when laptop crashed – allowed
data to be retrieved easily 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:
1955-04-12_notes_MassObs.docx
1955-04-12_questionnaire_MassObs.pdf
1963-12-15_notes_Gorer.docx
1963-12-15_questionnaire_Gorer.pdf
Order by subject:
Gorer_notes_1963-12-15.docx
Gorer_questionnaire_1963-12-15.pdf
MassObs_notes_1955-04-12.docx
MassObs_questionnaire_1955-04-12.pdf
Order by type:
Notes_Gorer_1963-12-15.docx
Notes_MassObs_1955-04-12.docx
Questionnaire_Gorer_1963-12-15.pdf
Questionnaire_MassObs_1955-04-12.pdf
Forced order with numbering:
01_MassObs_questionnaire_1955-04-12.pdf
02_MassObs_notes_1955-04-12.docx
03_Gorer_questionnaire_1963-12-15.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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