We recently held our fifth Data Conversations here at Lancaster University Library. These events bring researchers together and act as a forum to share their experiences of using and sharing data. The vibe’s informal and we provide our attendees with complementary coffee, cake and pizza…
It’s FAIR to say that pizza is a popular part of the event. Who doesn’t love pizza…? The informal lunch at the start brings researchers together. It’s a chance to spark conversations and connections with colleagues from different disciplines and at different career stages.
Once again we had a great programme with contributions from three fantastic speakers: 
Up first was Dr David Ellis, Lecturer in Computational Social Science from the Psychology department and one of our Jisc Data Champions. David spoke about his experiences (including challenges and solutions) of working with National Health Service Data.
Next up was Jessica Phoenix, Criminology PhD Candidate. Jess spoke about her Masters dissertation project which looked at missing persons and the link between risk assessment and time to resolution. She spoke about the challenges and solutions associated with creating a dataset from pre-existing raw data. Issues that were amplified as the data were highly sensitive and identifiable (police records).
Last up was Professor Chris Hatton, Centre for Disability Research, Division of Health Research. Chris discussed his experience of collaborating with social workers to achieve uniquely valuable results. He also explored the way in which social media (his Twitter account) has provided a platform to engage with a wide array of voices that he couldn’t have reached through conventional research methods.
It was a another fantastic installment in an ongoing series of Data Conversations. We thoroughly enjoyed it and we’re looking forward to 6th Data Conversations: Keep it, throw it, put it in the vault…? We hope you can join us, sign up today!
Joshua Sendall, Research Data Manager @JSendall