The Timescapes Archive
- 1. The Timescapes ArchiveIncremental Project and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH)Digital Forum19 January 2011CambridgeLibby BishopUniversity of Leeds – TimescapesUniversity of Essex – UK Data Archive
- 2. Timescapes ThemesRelationships, identities, family life, intimacy, care and supportThe dynamics of personal lives : key turning points and transitionsPeople’s biographies set against a backdrop of inter-generational and historical change
- 3. Projects that span the lifecourseProjects:Siblings and Friends: children’s lateral relationshipsYoung Lives and Times: teen to adulthood transitionsThe Dynamics of Motherhood: an intergenerational projectMasculinities, Identities and Risk: lives of men and fathers Work and Family Lives: the changing experiences of ‘young’ families Intergenerational Exchange: grandparents, exclusion and health The Oldest Generation: events, relationships identities in later lifeData:Qualitative longitudinal (10+ years) multi-media data400+ participants
- 5. The Timescapes Programme structureThree strands braiding research, archiving and reuseDeclared goal to engage researchers as stakeholders
- 6. Distinctive aspects of the Timescapes ArchiveIntegration of research, archiving and reuseMulti-media, longitudinal data with documentationExplicit focus on ethical reuse of QL data Accessible and secureLinkages with other longitudinal dataStriving to engage researchers as stakeholders
- 8. The data is from three waves of interviews with the respondent and includes transcripts and photographs taken by the respondent.If you click on the fourth entry for Wave Three you see this image.The viewer allows you to zoom in and out of the image, rotate left and right and to see the image at its full size or as a best fit for the screen.Going back to the results will allow you to access more information about the data.
- 9. These essays can be matched to the NCDS survey data of 11 year olds done in 1969. Extensive quantitative data is available, along with the young people’s essays.
- 10. Is it ethical to reuse data?Depends in part on confidentiality and agreements made at the time of data collectionArchived data should always conform to ethical and legal guidelines with respect to not disclosing participants’ identity when this has been requested by informantsAchieve this by various strategies:consent for archiving (as well as participant, publication)editing the original data (e.g., anonymisation)controlling access (e.g., licences, case-by-case basis)
- 11. Why ask researchers to engage with archiving?Early, informed consent from participants to share dataConsistent data management-transcription, anonymisationRich and extensive contextual documentationResearchers as partners in design of access system-to ensure proper balance of sharing and protectionCollaborative models for reuse rather than “handoff”To give participants greater voiceTo ensure precious, hard-to-collect data is used
- 12. Seemed like good ideas at the time…6: Can I ask a, I mean, I’m absolutely fascinated by this whole idea that you archive as you go along. I mean, I couldn’t begin to imagine doing that.4: Neither can we. (Member of Timescapes team)
- 13. What worked well (mostly) Consent(mostly) standardised form , c. 95% consented
- 14. 225 participants so far – 17 no consent/embargoTranscription and documentation
- 17. Anonymisation – mixed picture… Guidelines jointly developed, butUneven implementation.Revised system for marking sensitive and anonymised text-PLEASE READ These guidelines document an important shift from the previous (18 April version) for marking anonymised text. The previous version called for use of an XML tag “<seg>”. That system is no longer recommended and a new system has replaced it.Timescapes recommends using the following system to indicate anonymised text. At the start of the text to be anonymised, use the punctuation marks @@. At the end of the text, use the marks ##...
- 19. What worked (less) well“I think at the moment the issue for me, for us, is that we didn’t anticipate how long it would take to prepare the data for archiving. And because… it is current and we’re aware that the data that we’re working with, are people’s current situations, that makes us even more concerned about anonymising, perhaps. ..But because of the time-consuming process, it can feel like a lot of our time is preparing the data for other people to use, rather than us, who collected the data, getting the chance to work on it, which is not really what we, the kind of situation that we want to be in.” (Timescapes researcher)
- 20. Stakeholder model has pros and consSome very real costsTriple burden – collection, archiving, reuseBurden fell disproportionately on early career researchersBut major successes as wellConsent – high success rate with difficult dataDemonstrated key role for fine-grained access controlsInnovations in researchers’ engagement with archivingWorking papers; researchers’ accounts in the archive
- 21. Emerging bright spots…Practices to address researcher exposure:Growth in more powerful access control toolsArchive “parallel” accounts from researchers, in addition to other contextual documentationAccounts can also help to showcase under-acknowledged skills of preparing data for archivingFinally, just as participants don’t (usually) reveal more than they want to, researchers may learn skills from “the other side of the microphone”
- 22. The Timescapes Archive:http://ludos.leeds.ac.uk/ludos/ESDS Qualidata:http://www.esds.ac.uk/qualidata/