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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