Digital Research: preserving your research data
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This document discusses the importance of properly documenting digital research. It provides several quotes emphasizing how documentation allows researchers to understand past work, remember decisions made, and reproduce experiments even after time has passed. The document also presents examples of well-organized folder structures and file naming conventions that help provide necessary context and information for future use of research data and results.
![www.bl.uk 7
‘the fragility of evidence in the
digital era’
‘[the digital] archive is considerably more fragile than one would like’
‘The simultaneous fragility and promiscuity of digital data’
Roy Rosenzweig, Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era, The
American Historical Review 108:3 (2003), 736, 737, 739.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2014-03-17clrlhslides-140317043531-phpapp02/85/Digital-Research-preserving-your-research-data-7-320.jpg)
![www.bl.uk 9
‘The core guiding principle is simple: Someone unfamiliar
with your project should be able to look at
your computer files and understand in detail
what you did and why […] Most commonly,
however, that “someone” is you. A few months from
now, you may not remember what you were up to when you created a
particular set of files, or you may not remember what conclusions you drew.
You will either have to then spend time reconstructing your previous
experiments or lose whatever insights you gained from those experiments.’
William Stafford Noble (2009) A Quick Guide to Organizing Computational Biology
Projects. PLoS Comput Biol 5(7): e1000424. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000424](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2014-03-17clrlhslides-140317043531-phpapp02/85/Digital-Research-preserving-your-research-data-9-320.jpg)
Digital Research: preserving your research data
- 1. Digital Research: preserving your research data …yes I said data! Dr James Baker, Curator, Digital Research @j_w_baker james.baker@bl.uk
- 2. www.bl.uk 2 Some admin… You are free to: – Copy, share, adapt, or re-mix – Photograph, film, or broadcast – Blog, live-blog, or post video of; this presentation provided that: – You attribute the work to its author and respect the rights and licences associated with its components – You distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one Text attribution Greg Wilson, Two Solitudes, SPLASH 2013 (29 October 2013) http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/splash-2013 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License unless stated otherwise.
- 3. www.bl.uk 3 More than resource discovery “The emergence of the new digital humanities isn’t an isolated academic phenomenon. The institutional and disciplinary changes are part of a larger cultural shift, inside and outside the academy, a rapid cycle of emergence and convergence in technology and culture” Steven E Jones, Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2013)
- 4. www.bl.uk 4
- 5. www.bl.uk 5 ‘Literary scholars and historians have in the past been limited in their analyses of print culture by the constraints of physical archives and human capacity. A lone scholar cannot read, much less make sense of, millions of newspaper pages. With the aid of computational linguistics tools and digitized corpora, however, we are working toward a large-scale, systemic understanding of how texts were valued and transmitted during this period’ David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, ‘Infectious Texts: Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers’ (2013) http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dasmith/infect-bighum-2013.pdf
- 6. www.bl.uk 6 discipline camp and camps sentence
- 7. www.bl.uk 7 ‘the fragility of evidence in the digital era’ ‘[the digital] archive is considerably more fragile than one would like’ ‘The simultaneous fragility and promiscuity of digital data’ Roy Rosenzweig, Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era, The American Historical Review 108:3 (2003), 736, 737, 739.
- 9. www.bl.uk 9 ‘The core guiding principle is simple: Someone unfamiliar with your project should be able to look at your computer files and understand in detail what you did and why […] Most commonly, however, that “someone” is you. A few months from now, you may not remember what you were up to when you created a particular set of files, or you may not remember what conclusions you drew. You will either have to then spend time reconstructing your previous experiments or lose whatever insights you gained from those experiments.’ William Stafford Noble (2009) A Quick Guide to Organizing Computational Biology Projects. PLoS Comput Biol 5(7): e1000424. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000424
- 10. www.bl.uk 10 Victory is mine: while ago I worked out some Clever Stuff (tm) in Excel. And I MADE NOTES ON IT. And those notes ENABLED ME TO DO IT AGAIN. Katie Birkwood (girlinthe). “Victory is mine: while ago I worked out some Clever Stuff (tm) in Excel. And I MADE NOTES ON IT. And those notes ENABLED ME TO DO IT AGAIN.” 7 October 2013, 3:46 a.m. Tweet.
- 11. www.bl.uk 11 Documentation What – How – Decisions – Connections – Formats
- 13. www.bl.uk 13 domain / record / reference number http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/record/SBD0931
- 14. www.bl.uk 14 root events research teaching writing rootresearch 2014-01_Journal_Articles 2014-02_Infrastructure rootresearch2014_Journal_Articles analysis data notes
- 15. www.bl.uk 15 Notes about this folder.docx VS 2014-01-03_writing_readme.txt 2014-01-03_Writing_readme.md
- 17. www.bl.uk 17
- 18. www.bl.uk 18 Thank you! @j_w_baker james.baker@bl.uk http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/ Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/drjwbaker/2014-0317-clrlhslides Notes: https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/9596448