Research Services Introduction to research data management - a social science case study Slides provided by DaMaRO Project, University of Oxford

Research Services The researcher  Dr David Alsop, a postdoc in the Department of Anthropology  Studying the structures and dynamics of the Fijian community in Japan  Research conducted through a year’s fieldwork  Involved participant observation, face-to-face interviews, and a questionnaire

Research Services The dataset  70 recorded interviews of roughly an hour each  Transcripts of the interviews  64 questionnaire responses  120 pages of field notes  Statistical data on migrants in Japan  Plus tourist pamphlets, photos, books, journal articles, etc…

Research Services Storage and back-up strategy  Working data stored on personal laptop  Weekly back-up to external hard drive, and to two memory sticks  Key files also sent as attachments, or saved to Dropbox  Post-project, data copied to DVDs for long-term storage Introduction to research data management Page 4

Research Services File naming strategies – examples  Order by date: _interview-recording_THD.mp _interview-transcript_THD.docx _interview-recording_MBD.mp _interview-transcript_MBD.docx  Order by subject: MBD_interview-recording_ mp3 MBD_interview-transcript_ docx THD_interview-recording_ mp3 THD_interview-transcript_ docx  Order by type: Interview-recording_MBD_ mp3 Interview-recording_THD_ mp3 Interview-transcript_MBD_ docx Interview-transcript_THD_ docx  Forced order with numbering: 01_THD_interview-recording_ mp3 02_THD_interview-transcript_ docx 03_MBD_interview-recording_ mp3 04_MBD_interview-transcript_ docx

Research Services 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

Research Services Metadata – data about data  A formal, structured description of a dataset  Used by archives to create catalogue records Page 7 Introduction to research data management

Research Services Data preservation and sharing plan  Confidentiality considerations prevent the interview recordings being made available in unedited form  However, anonymized selections of the data may be made available to accompany publications  Researcher will also re-use the data himself, for comparative purposes, in a project looking at Fijian migrants in London

Research Services 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 OxfordDaMaRO Project  It is based on information about real research projects provided by the academics who worked on them – though all names have been changed, and case studies may have been edited, amplified, or combined  With the exception of clip art used with permission from Microsoft, the slideshow is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike License MicrosoftCreative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike License  Within the terms of this licence, we actively encourage sharing, adaptation, and re-use of this material