CESSDA Widening Activities 2018 Deliverable 1 – Resource Directory

Understanding the needs of both CESSDA service providers (SPs) and partners (i.e. future SPs) is essential for the success of CESSDA as a whole. Sustainable tools must be developed and made available for addressing these needs, as well as for facilitating and encouraging exchange between data archive services (DAS) at different maturity levels. The Resource Directory developed during the “CESSDA Widening Activities 2018” project is a tool that contributes to addressing partners’ and less mature CESSDA SPs’ needs. The aim of the Resource Directory is to help disseminate existing resources within CESSDA and its SPs – that either help building a DAS or developing new services and features within existing DAS – among CESSDA partners and less mature CESSDA SPs. This contributes to the ultimate objectives of widening activities, which are to help the partners in building sustainable and mature data services and achieving CESSDA membership. Furthermore, the Resource Directory contributes to increasing CESSDA visibility in non-member countries. The Resource Directory gathers resources together which are already available on different institutional websites. The resources are accessible via web links or DOIs; no resource is physically attached to the Directory. The Resource Directory is thus a central point of access to the resources that aid the building and development of mature DAS, and in achieving CESSDA membership. Information on relevant documents, trainings, tools and support services resulting from past and current CESSDA projects and activities at the SPs have been collected, selected and reviewed specifically for this purpose. The Resource Directory is therefore a curated inventory of these specific resources with aggregated listing of information. The Resource Directory contains currently 189 resources (version 1.2) that support the development of a DAS. A wide range of resources is available in the Directory. In order to guide the users within the Directory, specific labels, descriptions and metadata were applied to index and define the resources. The labels and metadata can be used to select specific resources for a user-friendly search, allowing easy and rapid access to the resources of interest. If a tool is already available, further developments of the Resource Directory are needed. The first one is to publish the Resource Directory online in a more user-friendly way and to make it available via the CESSDA website. Second, in order for the Resource Directory not to become obsolete, it needs maintenance. A proper maintenance means at the same time updating and completing its records to integrate the many resources available within CESSDA and its SPs, and enhancing the tool with, for example, an assessment of the quality of the resources (and not only the relevance)

CESSDA SaW Deliverable D4.6 - Report on Sustainability Model of Development Support Services

CESSDA Service Providers are obligated to provide support to member countries where the national infrastructures are immature and/or fragile. This report proposes a model for sustainably providing support services to aid the development throughout the CESSDA Service Provider community and to aspiring members. Development support is categorised into long-term services and discrete activities, and the scope and scale of the demand for support were analysed. Towards the sustainability of development support services, we examined the financial models that may be deployed, possible external sources of funding, how to support knowledge about the services and activities that are available, and how needs should be assessed

The Trouble With Big Data

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Trinity College Dublin, DARIAH-EU and the European Commission. This book explores the challenges society faces with big data, through the lens of culture rather than social, political or economic trends, as demonstrated in the words we use, the values that underpin our interactions, and the biases and assumptions that drive us. Focusing on areas such as data and language, data and sensemaking, data and power, data and invisibility, and big data aggregation, it demonstrates that humanities research, focussing on cultural rather than social, political or economic frames of reference for viewing technology, resists mass datafication for a reason, and that those very reasons can be instructive for the critical observation of big data research and innovation

From research data repositories to virtual research environments: a case study from the Humanities

The difference in scholarly practices between the sciences and the mainstream humanities is highlighted in a study (Palmer et al., 2009), which investigated the types of information source materials used in different humanities disciplines, based on results contained in the US Research Libraries Group (RLG) reports. Structured data is relatively little used, except in some areas of historical research, and data as it is traditionally understood in the sciences, i.e. the results of measurements and the lowest level of abstraction for the generation of scientific knowledge, even less so. It is true that the study is partly outdated, containing results from the early 1990s, and that data in the traditional sense is becoming increasingly important in the humanities, particularly for disciplines such as linguistics and archaeology in which scientific techniques have been widely adopted. Nevertheless, it is clear that in general humanities research relies not on measurements as a source of authority, but rather on the provenance of sources and assessment by peers, and that what data repositories are for the sciences, archives are for the humanities. [...

From research data repositories to virtual research environments: a case study from the Humanities

The difference in scholarly practices between the sciences and the mainstream humanities is highlighted in a study (Palmer et al., 2009), which investigated the types of information source materials used in different humanities disciplines, based on results contained in the US Research Libraries Group (RLG) reports. Structured data is relatively little used, except in some areas of historical research, and data as it is traditionally understood in the sciences, i.e. the results of measurements and the lowest level of abstraction for the generation of scientific knowledge, even less so. It is true that the study is partly outdated, containing results from the early 1990s, and that data in the traditional sense is becoming increasingly important in the humanities, particularly for disciplines such as linguistics and archaeology in which scientific techniques have been widely adopted. Nevertheless, it is clear that in general humanities research relies not on measurements as a source of authority, but rather on the provenance of sources and assessment by peers, and that what data repositories are for the sciences, archives are for the humanities. [...

Legislative Documents

Also, variously referred to as: Senate bills; Senate documents; Senate legislative documents; legislative documents; and General Court documents

Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Hogenaar A, Tjalsma H, Priddy M. Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In: Meier zu Verl C, Horstmann W, eds. Studies on Subject-Specific Requirements for Open Access Infrastructure. Bielefeld: Universitätsbibliothek; 2011: 165-213.The social sciences and the humanities taken together contain a heterogeneous range of research disciplines. Almost all existing methods of research can be found within these two domains. Data handling (collecting, processing, selecting, preserving) and publication methods differ greatly. Attitudes in the field towards Open Access of publications as well to research data vary as well. It is not possible to cover the total fullness, and complexity, of all the disciplines within these two domains. Our observations will therefore be based upon a number of case studies. Taken together these case studies give a fairly representative picture of the domains, at least of the most common research environments. The main dividing line is between those disciplines creating empirical data, such as survey data in the social sciences and those, especially in the humanities, using existing source material, such as history or text studies. This source material can either be of an analogous or a digital nature. As will be shown in the case studies in many disciplines a mix of created and existing is often combined

FAIR-IMPACT Introduction on exposing repository trustworthiness status and FAIR data assessments outcomes [Poster]

The FAIR-IMPACT project supports the implementation of FAIR-enabling practices, tools and services. Guidelines and a prototype on trustworthiness will showcase that exposing (meta)data as well as accompanying evidence and breaking up information silos, adds value to certification, discovery portals and assessment. This poster was presented at the 1st Conference on Research Data Infrastructure (CoRDI2023), organised by NFDI in Karlsruhe

The Trouble With Big Data

This book explores the challenges society faces with big data, through the lens of culture rather than social, political or economic trends, as demonstrated in the words we use, the values that underpin our interactions, the biases and assumptions that drive us.illustrato

Digital Humanities, Knowledge Complexity and the Six ‘Aporias’ of Digital Research

Abstract of paper 0656 presented at the Digital Humanities Conference 2019 (DH2019), Utrecht , the Netherlands 9-12 July, 2019