Opportunities for ‘data intensive’ social research are growing but funding for data management remains a challenge.

The Digital Curation Centre have been vigorously involved with identifying core components of an effective institutional policy to improve research data management. Angus Whyte runs through the opportunities and challenges in business planning for RDM. Funding and sustaining such services requires a clear vision of what better data management will do for the institution, its researchers, and the broader community. The key is to avoid unintended outcomes of poor design of services or inadequate resourcing

Curating Brain Images in a Psychiatric Research Group: SCARP Case Study No.1 Summary and Recommendations

Curating neuroimaging research data for sharing and re-use involves practical challenges for those concerned in its use and preservation. These are exemplified in a case study of the Neuroimaging Group in the University of Edinburgh’s Division of Psychiatry. The study is one of the SCARP series encompassing two aims; firstly to discover more about disciplinary approaches and attitudes to digital curation through ‘immersion’ in selected cases, in this case drawing on ethnographic approaches. Secondly SCARP aims to apply known good practice, and where possible to identify new lessons from practice in the selected discipline areas; in this case using action research to assess risks to the long term reusability of datasets, and identify challenges and opportunities for change. The Neuroimaging Group is involved in several collaborative eScience initiatives to improve data sharing and re-use in their discipline. At the same time a key issue for them is improvement of local infrastructure to address their expanding digital curation needs

Roles and Reusability of Video Data in Social Studies of Interaction: SCARP Case Study No. 5 Summary and Recommendations

Social science researchers are making increasing use of digital video. All of us, researchers or not, have an alluring range of commercial web sites for sharing video, although these do not cater for long-term reuse of video in research. But what kind of roles does video fulfil as research data? And what curation issues and challenges does video raise for researchers and their institutions? The phenomenal growth in public use of digital video is a topic of social research; in the first six months of 2008, users of Youtube uploaded more video footage than the top three U.S. TV networks would have broadcast if they had been operating 24 hours per day over their sixty-year lifespan (Wesch, 2008). Yet there have been few studies of social scientists’ own uses of digital video data in their research

Report from the DCC Workshop: Legal Environment of Digital Curation

This is a report from the Legal Environment of Digital Curation workshop held at Glasgow University on November 23, 2007. The event provided an overview of legal considerations for non-legal professionals who work with data, focusing especially on intellectual property rights and licensing, data protection, freedom of information and privacy, and data as evidence. The workshop was organised in conjunction with the SCRIPT-ed journal of law and technology, and supported by JISC, the AHRC and Edinburgh University

Curating Brain Images in a Psychiatric Research Group: Infrastructure and Preservation Issues SCARP Case Study No. 1

Curating neuroimaging research data for sharing and re-use involves practical challenges for those concerned in its use and preservation. These are exemplified in a case study of the Neuroimaging Group in the University of Edinburgh’s Division of Psychiatry. The study is one of the SCARP series encompassing two aims; firstly to discover more about disciplinary approaches and attitudes to digital curation through ‘immersion’ in selected cases, in this case drawing on ethnographic field study. Secondly SCARP aims to apply known good practice, and where possible to identify new lessons from practice in the selected discipline areas; in this case using action research to assess risks to the long term reusability of datasets, and identify challenges and opportunities for change

Neuroimaging Data Landscapes: Annex to SCARP Case Study 1

This is the Annex to Case Study No. 1 of the Digital Curation Centre’s SCARP Project titled ‘Curating Brain Images in a Psychiatric Research Group: Infrastructure and Preservation Issues’ (SCARP Deliverable number B4.8.2.1). It comprises a literature review and discussion of the study methodology, which elaborate on the main report’s treatment of these

Open Science in Practice: Researcher Perspectives and Participation

We report on an exploratory study consisting of brief case studies in selected disciplines, examining what motivates researchers to work (or want to work) in an open manner with regard to their data, results and protocols, and whether advantages are delivered by working in this way. We review the policy background to open science, and literature on the benefits attributed to open data, considering how these relate to curation and to questions of who participates in science. The case studies investigate the perceived benefits to researchers, research institutions and funding bodies of utilising open scientific methods, the disincentives and barriers, and the degree to which there is evidence to support these perceptions. Six case study groups were selected in astronomy, bioinformatics, chemistry, epidemiology, language technology and neuroimaging. The studies identify relevant examples and issues through qualitative analysis of interview transcripts. We provide a typology of degrees of open working across the research lifecycle, and conclude that better support for open working, through guidelines to assist research groups in identifying the value and costs of working more openly, and further research to assess the risks, incentives and shifts in responsibility entailed by opening up the research process are needed

Neighbouring as an occasioned activity : "Finding a lost cat"

To illustrate the decline in a strong sense of community the characteristics of suburban living are often cited by social and cultural commentators. Spatially dispersed, lifeless during the daytime due to commuting, an excessive concern with keeping up appearances in terms of lawns, flowerbeds and property maintenance, moreover, suburbia, suffers perhaps worst of all, from weak social relations between residents. Such disparaging commentary on suburban neighbourhoods is frequently a premise for social scientists to define their version of “the good community”, bemoan its absence or decline, and has little concern for the phenomena of daily life in suburbia. In its concern to advance one or another political agenda conventional social and cultural studies miss just how suburban residents organise their everyday lives at ground level. Drawing on the insights of ethnomethodology and other studies of social practice we offer some therapeutic descriptions of neighbouring. From our ethnographic fieldwork in a UK suburb we show, via the incident of the search for a lost cat, how everyday talk formulates places and is formulated by its location in the ongoing occasioned activities of neighbours. In contrast to studies that have depicted suburbia as a place where morals are minimised, we show how conduct amongst neighbours constantly displays specific and locally accomplished moral commitments. Building on our own and other ethnographic research we list some of the rules of good neighbouring and investigate how such rules are followed or otherwise oriented to during encounters between neighbours. We also make a start on the explication of the seen but un-noticed features of what neighbours know of one another as settled neighbours. In doing so we return to our initial topic of community and neighbouring to learn some of the good reasons for neighbours maintaining the social distances that they typically do

Curated Databases in the Life Sciences: The Edinburgh Mouse Atlas Project

This case study scopes and assesses the data curation aspects of the Edinburgh Mouse Atlas Project (EMAP), a programme funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC). The principal goal for EMAP is to develop an expression summary for each gene in the mouse embryo, which collectively has been named the Edinburgh Mouse Atlas Gene-Expression Database (EMAGE)