DARIAH Pathfinder to Data Management Best Practices in the Humanities

#1. Why research data management?

Systematically planning how you will collect, document, organize, manage, share and preserve your data has many benefits. It helps to build a common framework of understanding with your collaborators and other stakeholders such as data archivists or professionals of GLAM institutions. But you can also think of your future self as your primary collaborator, imagining yourself looking for that one missing reference or document buried somewhere in your (physical or virtual) files. Proper data management allows you to prevent loss of information, to virtually travel back and forth in time, to ask questions from your future/past self and also to make your data future proof for others to find, understand, use and cite. In addition, by documenting your data and recommending appropriate ways to cite it, you can be sure that you will receive credit for your data products and their use.

This resource list brings together tools, videos, short articles and other training materials that might be relevant when reflecting on your data management processes both in the immediate context of your research and in their broader disciplinary context. Its aim is to equip you with tools and practical advice, but more importantly, with conceptual twists that will help you to establish ethically committed, optimal and as open as possible research and data management workflows. Each section consist of a brief introduction, describing the context; resources in sharing best practices for maximizing the potential of arts and humanities research data; and a list of tools you can make an integral part of your data management routines. Think of it as an inventory: you can browse through the resource list and select the items or topic areas the most relevant for your work. Let’s get started with a healthy boost of motivation:

• Data Champions (Why research data management 4/4)
• Primer on Data Management: What you always wanted to know
• An introduction to the basics of Research Data
• The Open Research Data and Materials chapter of the FOSTER Open Science Handbook will make you familiar with the core concepts and practices of (open) data management.
• …and a dose of cautiousness: How NOT to share your data: avoiding data horror stories.

#2. Data in the Humanities

This section discusses research data management practices in a domain-specific context. Depending on what discipline or sector you work in, you may not even realize you are working with data. In the arts and humanities, this term covers a great variety of resources: primary sources, secondary sources and outputs (such as laser scanner data, musical notations, voice recordings, geospatial data, survey data, corpora, annotations, text encodings, bibliographies, dictionaries, critical editions etc.) that can be both digital and analogue, machine created or human created, highly structured or utterly unstructured. In many cases, data are ‘born’ or become qualified as data in the course of the research process. Think about, for instance, publications or social media posts. The ways in which we interact with them (learning from them vs. collecting, structuring and enriching them for analysis) define whether they are considered as data in a specific research scenarios. The resources below provide an overview of the nature of humanities data.

2.1. For a comprehensive overview: The PARTHENOS training module Manage, Improve and Open Up Your Research and Data is a full, independent training module that will guide through some of the fundamental issues in research data management in the humanities such as: what is metadata; who are the stakeholders in a data management in a humanities context; how to manage cultural heritage assets; data quality assessment; ethics and research; data management planning; or Research Infrastructures and data policy.

2.2.The Open Data for Humanists: a Pragmatic Guide is a great starting point for researchers who are eager to share their data but don’t know where to begin. It gives practical advice on a range of questions and issues, for example: what questions to ask your archivist during your first visit to the archive; how to manage source data; processural phase data and publications as communication of data; and how small changes across these three points in your research workflow can make big differences.

2.3.Introduction to Humanities Research Data Management: this presentation by Ulrike Wuttke gently introduces humanities and cultural heritage researchers to activities and issues around planning, organizing, storing, and sharing data and other research results and products. It will guide you to identify the main characteristics, potential, and challenges in, your own research data. It will encourage you to think through all phases of data collection; data documentation and metadata; ethics and legal compliance; storage and backup; selection and preservation; data sharing and responsibilities in data sharing; and resources for data management in the context of your own project.

#3. The devil is in the context: a processural view on data curation

In the scholarly discourse about data management, there has been much discussion of the desirable format and structure of the final outputs of a research project, which we call research data. However, managing your research data is by far not a final output-oriented mechanism: proper data management takes place in all phases of the research lifecycle. By planning how the data will be analyzed well ahead, one can choose how best the data should be collected. The formats, standards or data model you work with determine whether, and how, other research communities will be able to make sense of your data. You will need to answer questions related to documentation, storage, quality assurance and ownership for each stage of the data lifecycle so that your research can be viewed, managed, accessed and ultimately assessed in terms of the integrity of processes, rather than only as products. The more people can follow how you reached a conclusion based on your analysis procedures (such as additional modifications to the data, the model used, the code and codebook used to run the analysis, and hardware and software specifications and other supplementary materials that help the interpretation of your data), the more confidently they can reuse your data. The use of data management plans (see section 5) help structure your thinking in this respect.

3.1. The Parthenos Standardization Survival Kit (SSK) is designed to support researchers in selecting and using the appropriate standards for their particular disciplines and workflows. It will help you to think of data curation as a process that is well-aligned with your specific research life-cycle as well as with your disciplinary contexts. It collects real life researcher-oriented use cases from literature to heritage science, including history, social sciences, linguistics, etc. This format allows domain experts to share their guidance and advocacy about the use of standards in a meaningful way, that is, embedded in specific research scenarios. Those scenarios can be seen as a living memory of what should be the best research practices in a given community, made accessible and reusable for other researchers wishing to carry out a similar project but unfamiliar with the recommended tools, formats, or methods to use.

3.2. The Top 10 FAIR Data & Software Things, Humanities: Historical research resource shows how the fairly abstract FAIR principles can be translated into real community good practices. It will provide you with practical advice on how to structure, organize and model your data, what are the benefits of using controlled vocabularies and ontologies, how to license and how to cite your data properly.

The Top 10 FAIR Data & Software Things series also contain modules dedicated to Musicology and Linked Open Data .

#4. Sharing your data

Making your data available in a trustworthy data repository is an essential step in your research data management workflow. By doing so,

• You can make sure that others (humans and machines alike) can find your work, beyond accidentally stumbling across it on your project website.
• You can make sure that your data will be preserved over a long term, and therefore remain available for future research or verification.
• You make you data citable. Assigning persistent identifiers to your data will point to their exact location, even if that changes over time.
• Sharing your data in a repository inevitably brings quality improvement. By depositing them, you will clean them, document them to make them understandable for third parties and add the metadata necessary for their deposit.

Depending on the scope of your project and the volume of your data, depositing can be realized in a complex, iterative process with a strong emphasis on precise data quality assessment, but it can also be simple and easy. As a first step, check which kinds of support structures are available in your institution. If your institution has solid data repository facilities and/or data stewards who can help your work, you are lucky! It is well-worth to involving them from the project planning phase onwards and discussing the best solutions, which work well for your research but are also compliant with the standards, specifications and protocols along which the repository operates. Repository staff can also assist you with understanding any specific data management requirements and associated costs. If your funder requires a data management plan, this information should be included.

In deciding where to store your data, you may have a number of choices about who will look after it and how its findability and potential can be maximized. You can use generic repositories such as Zenodo, which will take almost any data sets, but you can also use more specific ones such as the DARIAH-DE Publikator that are geared towards certain disciplines or research data types. If your institution has data sharing policies, it is advisable to use your own institutional repository. The main standard to assess quality criteria of data repositories is the CoreTrustSeal certificate. Choose Core Trust Seal certified repositories to make sure that your data will remain available in the future in a secture, sustainably maintained and curated environment.

• The OpenAire repository guide helps you specifying your expectations towards repositories. Its second, more detailed version has been optimized for Horizon 2020 projects.
• You can find suitable research data repositories that best match the technical or legal requirements of your research data in the re3data.org database.The re3data database has a special application for arts and humanities, the demonstrator instance of the Data Deposit Recommendation Service (DDRS).

#4.1. Cite to be cited!

One of the main findings of the Barriers and Pathways to Community Engagement report conducted by the DARIAH Community Engagement Working Group is that data citation is not yet an established scholarly practice in the humanities domain. You can easily change this for the better and contribute to a research culture where data sharing is better rewarded in terms of citations. Once a Persistent identifier is linked to your data, it makes easier both for humans and machines to properly cite it. You can further increase your citation chances by recommending data citation formats for your data sets.

• According to the DataCite standards, the minimum metadata that is necessary to identify and locate the research products should include: the name of the creator, the year of publication, the title, the publisher and the identifier. If relevant, you can also add version and resource type information. For more detailed guidelines you can check the Force11 Joint Declaration on Data Citation Principles, a common, cross-disciplinary reference document.
• The CiteAs tool helps you to get the correct citation form for diverse research products, from software to preprints.
• The Open Data Citation in the Social Sciences and Humanities module of the DARIAH Winter School puts data citation best practices in a domain-specific context.

#4.2. Be aware of your licensing options

• Release your work under as open a license as possible, in order to facilitate its wide re-use. DARIAH recommends to use a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY 4.0). A CC-BY license allows another user to copy, distribute, display, perform your work, and make derivatives based on it, but only if the user gives you credit. CC-BY makes your position and that of your audiences clear, opening your work to reuse while also protecting the value of scholarly accountability, provenance and credit-giving. Metadata is often released under a CC0 license.

• To choose the most suitable license for your data (as well as for your software, publications and other types of research outputs), you can consult the following license selector tools: Creative Commons license picker, CLARIN LINDAT License Selector, or https://choosealicense.com/.

• This presentation prepared by Walter Scholger and Vanessa Hannesschläger, chairs of the DARIAH ELDAH working group will help you to better understand legal terms and issues regarding copyright and publication and how open licenses work. For more information about the responsible reuse of cultural heritage data, you can consult the The Collection Trust Guide to understanding copyright.

#4.3. A case study: different levels of being an open scholar

…and documenting your research practices.

Going beyond the scope of the research paper and sharing a broader scope of your research outputs allows you to address different communities of audiences to share different parts of the research process and results. For instance,

• sharing publications (Green) Open Access, so they accessible to all researchers and to the general public as well,
• sharing research ideas, musings, or results via blogs and social media (Twitter, Facebook etc.) with your peers and the broader public, and
• sharing data (annotations in this case)) with your peers and especially for use by Digital Humanities researchers.

You can learn more about Naomi’s lessons here: https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/node/2605

#5. A recipe for your research project: the Data Management Plan

Research communities are increasingly supported, incentivised, and in some cases even required, to establish a Data Management Plan at the outset of a project to consider the approach for creating, managing and sharing all research outputs. The Data Management Plan (DMP) is a standard support document that helps to formalise your thoughts and materialise your choices of how you manage your data throughout the life-cycle of your project. Creating a data management plan for your research project is similar to writing a recipe for a meal, which enables others to cook it too (nb: counter-incentives of sharing may also show a degree of similarity). It allows you to create an internal roadmap for your project and to explain why you have chosen certain solutions and formats; how the data you are working with is relevant to the research questions; where and what the value is in your data; what compromises you had to make e.g. due to legal restrictions; what the access conditions are as well as the estimated costs of data curation and deposit; and who is responsible for each data management activity.

Writing a DMP does not necessarily require the investment of a lot of time and effort. The training resources referenced above in section 2. will give you a good introduction on how to get started. More specifically:

• You can find a chapter dedicated to Data Management Planning in the PARTHENOS training module Manage, Improve and Open Up Your Research and Data Training module.
• The Introduction to Humanities Research Data Management resource also gives you a range of good advice and practical examples on how to create your own executable research data management plan and how to utilize it for your own good.

Further resources:

• Horizon 2020 Data management Guidelines: http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/grants_manual/hi/oa_pilot/h2020-hi-oa-data-mgt_en.pdf
• The European Research Council’s guide for Open Research Data and Data Management Plans: https://erc.europa.eu/document-category/guides
• Arts and Humanities Research Council Data Management Plan: https://zenodo.org/record/1745533#.XMFsHaRS-uU
• National Endowment for the Humanities - grant examples: https://www.neh.gov/grants
• RDMO - Research Data Management Organiser (available in German, a tool to support the systematic planning, organisation and implementation of the data management throughout the course of a research project. RDMO is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). https://rdmorganiser.github.io/

#6. Data in publications and data as publications

Another challenge in pushing forward the data sharing culture in the humanities is that the traditional paradigm of publishing papers still serves as the highest value currency of academia. Compared to this,the rewards of, and incentives for, data sharing is negligible. However, sincedata sharing is increasingly encouraged by funders policies, we have more and more opportunities to bring these two types of scholarly publications, data sharing and article or book publishing, closer to each other.

#6.1. The networked publication: interlinking the underlying data with your papers

By allowing the audience of your papers to look ‘behind the scenes’, and connecting them with the underlying data, you support the validation of your findings–and take a huge step forward in research transparency. Many publishers support their authors to cite data in their publications. Some are even issuing policies that require researchers to make the data underlying their published results available within a data repository.

• Do you know journals or book publishers in your discipline with data policies? Here you can find some examples:

  • Humanities (MDPI): https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/instructions
  • Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe (& all Taylor and Francis journals): https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=cdeb20&page=instructions#dsp

#6.2. Data journals in humanities

In addition, or in parallel, to making your data available in a repository, you can maximize the credit that you gain for them by publishing them in a data journal. Data journals, usually built on the top of data repository services, are designed to introduce, describe and contextualize data sets to facilitate their online exploration. One of the important benefits of publishing your data in terms of research data management is that it undergoes a peer-review process, which means that experts validate its quality, provide templates for its proper description and offer guidance on where to deposit it.

• Data journals in the humanities:

  • Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences
  • Journal of Open Humanities Data
  • Journal of Cultural Analytics
  • Journal of Open Archaeology Data
  • Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative
  • (Video) Journal of Embodied Research