Hi everyone, my name is Gaia Mosconi.
I am a PhD student at the university of Siegen where I have been working for the last 6 years
as conceptual designer and researcher in a project called INF which stands for Infrastructure.
This paper titled Designing a Data Story: is one of the major research outcomes of the
INF project and it has been written in collaboration with multiple co-authors which now I wanna thank
for their contribution.
This paper introduces a design concept called Data Story aimed specifically at supporting
the ongoing curation, sharing (and potential reuse) of qualitative and ethnographic data.
The main rationale behind the concept is to allow the curation and sharing of heterogenous
qualitative data accompanied with 1) written narratives or storytelling practices
for data contextualization, analysis and sense-making; but also 2) technical elements and standards,
such as metadata, tags and DOI for data curation and retrieval.
This research and the design effort which generated the concept itself are motivated by three
major elements:
first, the increased attention of funding agencies and academic institutions on Research
Data Management and Open Science principles, where all major fields and disciplines are nowadays expected
to embrace Open Data policies in order to get funding;
second, existing literature that has identified challenges specifically to the curation
and sharing of qualitative data which involve higher ethical concerns, being these data more
sensitive and private compared to other types;
but also by our own work with researchers applying ethnographic research methods which
pointed us to crucial RDM issues they personally face, and who at the same time, showed us
how to pursue the development of curation and data sharing practices in
a way that could be fruitful for them and that would resonate better with their
own practices.
Our context of investigation is a Collaborative Research Centre composed
by 14 projects with over sixty researchers, representing several major disciplines and faculties
As expected by project proposal, the goal
of the INF project is to make possible to embrace the OS agenda, finding a solution
that would allow curation and sharing practices to be developed.
Our fieldwork followed an ethnographic approach.
With our first interviews and observations, we mainly investigated researchers data life
cycle with a specifc focus on curation and sharing practices.
Our first insights, published in our previous work, allowed us to discover major gaps that
still exists between the OS grand vision and the bottom-up research practices observed
in the field.
It was evident that, while RDM practices are expected by all major funding agencies
these practices though are not yet supported by any tools that researchers use daily,
nor they are integrated in researchers workflows, and, in fact, these practices, if at all, are performed only informally.
Consequently, data curation and sharing practices, needed to meet the Open Science agenda, are
perceived by many as an unrewarding.
However, some researchers in the field showed an interest in innovative solutions that might
help them to represent and share highly heterogenous research data, initially for
their own purposes.
They were specifically interested in how to organize different data sources and underpin
the work of collaborative interpretation and sense-making.
This is where storytelling emerged as a possible design rationale to follow.
In fact, what emerged from the field was the central role of narratives that researchers
use to describe their own data to other colleagues.
Data which are rarely shared in full even with team members of the same project.
However, it is common practice to share data snippets in collaborative analysis sessions
with members of the same project and/or with other researchers.
These snippets are anonymized and are enriched with contextual information and sent
to participants via email.
Through oral and written narratives, qualitative data is constantly evolving and
being co-constructed in a collaborative effort that can engage team members, advisors,
and even study participants.
We also noticed how researchers have to constantly come up with new techniques and tools to assist
them in communicating ideas and interpreting data in a collaborative manner.
For example, a historian who made use of a Trello board to organize
these data with thematic sections, annotations, and then collaboratively discuss them with student assistants.
What we particularly took from the above is that there are already mechanisms in place
that researchers have to share the data
But what not happens is the sharing of all of the data in full, if ever.
Nor the curation of data with more standard and formal approaches, such
such as making use of metadata and data descriptions
as expected by Research Data Management guidelines and polices.
Data Story, as a concept, takes the notion of a story as a design metaphor and uses it
as a source of inspiration for the representation, organization and description of partial and
situated research data to be shared with colleagues, and/or with external audiences.
It is not an end-to-end solution, but it seeks to draw upon what already happens naturally
and to ingrain it with more structure, to make it easier to meeting some of the more
formal demands associated with the Research Data Management and Open Science goals.
In a nutshell,
Relevant components of the Data Story are: the integration of stories and metadata
standards which can accompany each chapters and files
a plugin solution that we envisioned to being implemented for major tools used by
like Microsoft Word and Maxqda in order to support a workflow
the generation of DOI and different accessibility rights which will allow researchers to share
their Data Story with different audiences.
And finally, the implementation of Data Story as a module in a collaborative research
platform already in use in our University and in our CRC.
As you will read in the paper, the Data Story aims to support the curation and sharing of
by offering:
1) a collaborative workflow for data curation; 2) a story-like format that can serve as an
organizing principle; 3) a means of enhancing and naturalizing curation
and sharing practices through storytelling.
As Birnholtz and Bietz (2003) have already suggested, to get more effective data sharing
systems, designers and IT developers need to go beyond current metadata models and take
into account social interactions around data abstractions.
Data Story takes this recommendation seriously and stresses the collaborative and social
dimensions inherent in data and data practices.
Composing Data Stories will still be time consuming for researchers and curation practices
will remain an overhead, however, we hope researchers will have the opportunity to gain
personal benefits such as organizing heterogeneous data but also structuring relevant findings
and analytical reflections to be used in collaborative discussions, publications and future work.
With the development of this concept, our wish is to promote a smooth transition toward
open science principles while remaining "as open as possible and as closed as necessary"
At present, Data Story remains a conceptual contribution - it has not yet been deployed
or evaluated.
However, we plan to develop the work further by testing the idea across a
range of different projects.
In this way, we hope to refine the concept and to gain deeper insights into how it might
best support researchers and the recipients of their data.
Clearly, we cannot wholly predict what the outcomes of this process might be, though
we can speculate.
For instance, innovations of this kind might form the basis of new publication formats
in the longer term and help to incentivize the work of data curation, which is currently
largely seen as unrewarding.
With this, I end my presentation and I thank you all.