Today is International Archives Day where everyone involved in preserving archives, records, data – whatever your take – celebrates the work that is happening worldwide to ensure the preservation of our memory and heritage and the protection of our rights by documenting decisions and building the foundations for good governance.
Our latest Data Interview features our two Jisc sponsored Data Champions, Dr Jude Towers and Dr David Ellis. Jude is a Lecturer in Sociology and Quantitative Methods and David a Lecturer in Computational Social Science in our Psychology Department.
Jude and David recently presented at a Jisc event on ‘Stories from the Field: Data are Messy and that’s (kind of) ok’.
I was lucky enough to have two days in London last week to attend two separate but linked events: the first was a Jisc sponsored workshop on Digital Appraisal and the second an Archivematica UK User group meet up. It was a nice balance of activities, Day One was around the theory of how we decide what to keep or what to throw away and Day Two was about sharing experiences of using Archivematica – a digital preservation tool which can potentially help us with aspects of this.
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…
Continue reading 5th Data Conversations – Stories from the Field
We held our fourth Data Conversation here at Lancaster University bringing together researcher and their experiences of using and sharing data over pizza and cake…
Continue reading 4th Data Conversation – Open Data Open Doors
Andrew Moore (@apmoore94) is a 2nd year PhD student at Lancaster University within the School of Computing and Communications. He is studying how sentiment analysis can be improved through world knowledge using finance as his specialised domain. His research interests are across Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Reproducibility.
We talked to Andrew after he presented at the 3rd Data Conversations.
What’s that about then?
Digital Archivists are a much misunderstood lot.
A lot of people think our work on digital preservation must be something to do with digitising old documents but this is absolutely not the case. Of course digitising old documents is fantastic and the wonderful resources which are now increasingly available on the internet like (and there are so many examples these are just some of my favourite ones) Charles Booth’s London or the Cambridge Digital Library . There are thousands and thousands useful for scholars, historians, students, teachers, genealogists, journalists – well just about anyone really who is interested in getting access to sources that would otherwise be near impossible to access. Digitising archive and library content has revolutionised the way we access and interact with archives, manuscripts and special collections.
Our latest Data Interview follows up a presentation at our 2nd Data Conversation. Alison Scott-Baumann (Professor of Society & Belief SOAS) and Dr Shuruq Naguib (Lecturer in Politics, Philosophy and Religion Lancaster) are working on the Re/presenting Islam on Campus project. Re/presenting Islam on Campus is a three year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). It explores how Islam and Muslims are represented and perceived on UK University campuses.
We had the opportunity to discuss research data issues surrounding their project. It turned out to be a highly interesting conversation on topics such as confidentiality, the limits of anonymisation, legal frameworks and the freedom of speech.
Continue reading Data Interview with Alison Scott-Baumann and Shuruq Naguib
We had our third Data Conversation here at Lancaster University again with the aim of bringing together researchers to share their data stories and discuss issues and exchange ideas in a friendly and informal setting.
We had a bit of a change this time, however, as we had a special guest speaker, Neil Chue-Hong of the Software Sustainability Institute talking about Software as “a different kind of research object“.
Continue reading 3rd Data Conversation – Software as data: summary and slides
It was fantastic to see PASIG 2017 (Preservation and Archives Special Interest Group) come to Oxford this year which meant I had the privilege of attending this prestigious international conference in the beautiful surroundings of Oxford’s Natural History Museum. All slides and presentations are available here.