Digital Research: preserving your research data

Digital Research: preserving

your research data …yes I said data!

Dr James Baker, Curator, Digital Research

@j_w_baker

[email protected]

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.

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)

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‘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

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discipline camp and

camps sentence

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‘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.

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Why bother?

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‘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

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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.

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Documentation What – How – Decisions – Connections – Formats

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Structure

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domain / record / reference number

http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/record/SBD0931

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\root \events

\research

\teaching

\writing

\root\research \2014-01_Journal_Articles

\2014-02_Infrastructure

\root\research\2014_Journal_Articles \analysis

\data

\notes

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Notes about this folder.docx

VS

2014-01-03_writing_readme.txt

2014-01-03_Writing_readme.md

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\root\research\2014-01_Journal_Articles\data\

2014-01-31_Journal_Articles.tsv

2014-01-31_Journal_Articles_notes.txt

\root\research\2014-01_Journal_Articles\analysis\

2014-02-02_Journal_Articles_analysis.txt

2014-02-15_Journal_Articles_analysis.txt

2014-02-02_Journal_Articles_analysis_readme.txt

\root\research\2014-01_Journal_Articles\data\derived_data\

2014-01-31_Journal_Articles_KW_africa.tsv

2014-01-31_Journal_Articles_KW_america.tsv

2014-02-01_Journal_Articles_KW_art.tsv

2014-02-02_Journal_Articles_KW_britain.tsv

www.bl.uk 17

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Thank you! @j_w_baker

[email protected]

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/

Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/drjwbaker/2014-0317-clrlhslides

Notes: https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/9596448