INSERT INTO `archive_posts` VALUES (4633,3,'2013-06-15 21:45:11','2013-06-15 21:45:11','In many ways the needs of and pressures on data curation are the same across the social sciences, humanities, and sciences. Moreover, since data curation, like other information sciences, is a “meta-discipline” ((Marcia J. Bates, “The Invisible Substrate of Information Science,” <i>Journal of the American Society for Information Science</i> 50, no. 12 (1999): 1043-50.)) rather than being strictly of the humanities, social sciences, or hard sciences, there are shared concepts and terminology that we can apply to the problems of data curation across disciplines. ((See Allen H. Renear, Molly Dolan, Kevin Trainor, and Melissa H. Cragin, “Towards a Cross-Disciplinary Notion of Data Level in Data Curation,” November 11, 2009, <a href=\"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/14547\">https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/14547</a>.)) Certainly, the technical challenges of preserving digital information—unstable media, basic bit-level data integrity, rendering many different file formats over time, architectures, and the economics of data storage—are shared problems. These pressures may be of differing intensity across communities. Many humanists do not (yet) have to contemplate data volumes measured in exabytes as astronomers do. Already, though, humanists are working with volumes of data too large to manipulate and analyze with conventional, widely available tools; this trend in humanities research is only likely to grow as researchers devote increasing attention to the contemporary moment. ((“Big Data,” <i>Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia</i>, February 9, 2013, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_data&amp;oldid=537356997\">http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_data&amp;oldid=537356997</a>.)) The basic structure of the scholarly communication economy is another shared challenge for data curation across the disciplines. Data curation must engage with which scholarly outputs are “published,” how credit is apportioned for them (the citation of datasets, for example), and the role of for-profit corporations in the dissemination of research (in relation to open access and open data movements).\r\n\r\nEven in the areas where there may be the most divergence about the needs of and pressures on data curation—the evidentiary role of information, the place of “interpretation,” and the nature of “proof”—I think there is more commonality than difference. As the amount of information grows and as the work of research in many disciplines increasingly involves managing and analyzing larger and larger amounts of information, human judgment is paired increasingly with (automated) machine analysis. (Part of data curation is working better with “robots.”) More rigorous conceptual and semantic modeling is needed to incorporate automated algorithmic processes into research—from the search engines everyone uses to the sophisticated data-filtering techniques necessary for working with streams of data coming from large telescopes. ((I am indebted to Sayeed Choudhury for the telescope example; any failing in the paraphrasing is mine. Personal conversation.)) Because machines increasingly and inevitably mediate our work with data, the challenges of preserving (human) meaning and interpretation in computational environments for data curation are significant, and this is true across the social sciences, humanities, and the sciences. ((Compare David Dubin, Karen M. Wickett, and Simone Sacchi, “Content, Format, and Interpretation,” <i>Balisage: The Markup Conference 2011</i>, August 2 - 5, 2011, <a href=\"http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol7/html/Dubin01/BalisageVol7-Dubin01.html\">http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol7/html/Dubin01/BalisageVol7-Dubin01.html</a>, doi:10.4242/BalisageVol7.Dubin01; and Julia Flanders and Trevor Muñoz, “An Introduction to Humanities Data Curation,” <i>DH Curation Guide</i>, September 22, 2011, <a href=\"http://guide.dhcuration.org/intro/\">http://guide.dhcuration.org/intro/</a>.))','Munoz - Question 2','In many ways the needs of and pressures on data curation are the same across the social sciences, humanities, and sciences. Moreover, since data curation, like other information sciences, is a “meta-discipline” rather than being strictly of the humanities, social sciences, or hard sciences, there are shared concepts and terminology that we can apply to the problems of data curation across disciplines. ','publish','open','open','','munoz-question-2','','','2013-06-22 04:32:14','2013-06-22 04:32:14','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=4633',0,'post','',0),(4634,3,'2013-06-15 21:44:12','2013-06-15 21:44:12','In many ways the needs of and pressures on data curation are the same across the social sciences, humanities, and sciences. Moreover, since data curation, like other information sciences, is a “meta-discipline” ((Marcia J. Bates, “The Invisible Substrate of Information Science,” <i>Journal of the American Society for Information Science</i> 50, no. 12 (1999): 1043-50.)) rather than being strictly of the humanities, social sciences, or hard sciences, there are shared concepts and terminology that we can apply to the problems of data curation across disciplines ((See Allen H. Renear, Molly Dolan, Kevin Trainor, and Melissa H. Cragin, “Towards a Cross-Disciplinary Notion of Data Level in Data Curation,” November 11, 2009, <a href=\"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/14547\">https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/14547</a>.)). Certainly, the technical challenges of preserving digital information—unstable media, basic bit-level data integrity, rendering many different file formats over time, architectures, and the economics of data storage—are shared problems. These pressures may be of differing intensity across communities. Many humanists do not (yet) have to contemplate data volumes measured in exabytes as astronomers do. Already, though, humanists are working with volumes of data too large to manipulate and analyze with conventional, widely available tools; this trend in humanities research is only likely to grow as researchers devote increasing attention to the contemporary moment ((.The basic structure of the scholarly communication economy is another shared challenge for data curation across the disciplines. Data curation must engage with which scholarly outputs are “published,” how credit is apportioned for them (the citation of datasets, for example), and the role of for-profit corporations in the dissemination of research (in relation to open access and open data movements).\n\n&nbsp;\n\nEven in the areas where there may be the most divergence about the needs of and pressures on data curation—the evidentiary role of information, the place of “interpretation,” and the nature of “proof”—I think there is more commonality than difference. As the amount of information grows and as the work of research in many disciplines increasingly involves managing and analyzing larger and larger amounts of information, human judgment is paired increasingly with (automated) machine analysis. (Part of data curation is working better with “robots.”) More rigorous conceptual and semantic modeling is needed to incorporate automated algorithmic processes into research—from the search engines everyone uses to the sophisticated data-filtering techniques necessary for working with streams of data coming from large telescopes.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn4\"><sup><sup>[iv]</sup></sup></a> Because machines increasingly and inevitably mediate our work with data, the challenges of preserving (human) meaning and interpretation in computational environments for data curation are significant, and this is true across the social sciences, humanities, and the sciences.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn5\"><sup><sup>[v]</sup></sup></a>\n<div><br clear=\"all\" />\n\n<hr align=\"left\" size=\"1\" width=\"33%\" />\n\n<div>\n\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref4\"><sup><sup>[iv]</sup></sup></a> I am indebted to Sayeed Choudhury for the telescope example; any failing in the paraphrasing is mine. Personal conversation.\n\n</div>\n<div>\n\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref5\"><sup><sup>[v]</sup></sup></a> Compare David Dubin, Karen M. Wickett, and Simone Sacchi, “Content, Format, and Interpretation,” <i>Balisage: The Markup Conference 2011</i>, August 2 - 5, 2011, <a href=\"http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol7/html/Dubin01/BalisageVol7-Dubin01.html\">http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol7/html/Dubin01/BalisageVol7-Dubin01.html</a>, doi:10.4242/BalisageVol7.Dubin01; and Julia Flanders and Trevor Muñoz, “An Introduction to Humanities Data Curation,” <i>DH Curation Guide</i>, September 22, 2011, http://guide.dhcuration.org/intro/.\n\n</div>\n</div>','Munoz - Question 2','','inherit','open','open','','4633-revision','','','2013-06-15 21:44:12','2013-06-15 21:44:12','',4633,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4633-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(4635,3,'2013-06-15 22:36:52','2013-06-15 22:36:52','In many ways the needs of and pressures on data curation are the same across the social sciences, humanities, and sciences. Moreover, since data curation, like other information sciences, is a “meta-discipline” ((Marcia J. Bates, “The Invisible Substrate of Information Science,” <i>Journal of the American Society for Information Science</i> 50, no. 12 (1999): 1043-50.)) rather than being strictly of the humanities, social sciences, or hard sciences, there are shared concepts and terminology that we can apply to the problems of data curation across disciplines. ((See Allen H. Renear, Molly Dolan, Kevin Trainor, and Melissa H. Cragin, “Towards a Cross-Disciplinary Notion of Data Level in Data Curation,” November 11, 2009, <a href=\"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/14547\">https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/14547</a>.)) Certainly, the technical challenges of preserving digital information—unstable media, basic bit-level data integrity, rendering many different file formats over time, architectures, and the economics of data storage—are shared problems. These pressures may be of differing intensity across communities. Many humanists do not (yet) have to contemplate data volumes measured in exabytes as astronomers do. Already, though, humanists are working with volumes of data too large to manipulate and analyze with conventional, widely available tools; this trend in humanities research is only likely to grow as researchers devote increasing attention to the contemporary moment. ((“Big Data,” <i>Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia</i>, February 9, 2013, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_data&amp;oldid=537356997\">http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_data&amp;oldid=537356997</a>.)) The basic structure of the scholarly communication economy is another shared challenge for data curation across the disciplines. Data curation must engage with which scholarly outputs are “published,” how credit is apportioned for them (the citation of datasets, for example), and the role of for-profit corporations in the dissemination of research (in relation to open access and open data movements).\n\nEven in the areas where there may be the most divergence about the needs of and pressures on data curation—the evidentiary role of information, the place of “interpretation,” and the nature of “proof”—I think there is more commonality than difference. As the amount of information grows and as the work of research in many disciplines increasingly involves managing and analyzing larger and larger amounts of information, human judgment is paired increasingly with (automated) machine analysis. (Part of data curation is working better with “robots.”) More rigorous conceptual and semantic modeling is needed to incorporate automated algorithmic processes into research—from the search engines everyone uses to the sophisticated data-filtering techniques necessary for working with streams of data coming from large telescopes. ((I am indebted to Sayeed Choudhury for the telescope example; any failing in the paraphrasing is mine. Personal conversation.)) Because machines increasingly and inevitably mediate our work with data, the challenges of preserving (human) meaning and interpretation in computational environments for data curation are significant, and this is true across the social sciences, humanities, and the sciences. ((Compare David Dubin, Karen M. Wickett, and Simone Sacchi, “Content, Format, and Interpretation,” <i>Balisage: The Markup Conference 2011</i>, August 2 - 5, 2011, <a href=\"http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol7/html/Dubin01/BalisageVol7-Dubin01.html\">http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol7/html/Dubin01/BalisageVol7-Dubin01.html</a>, doi:10.4242/BalisageVol7.Dubin01; and Julia Flanders and Trevor Muñoz, “An Introduction to Humanities Data Curation,” <i>DH Curation Guide</i>, September 22, 2011, <a href=\"http://guide.dhcuration.org/intro/\">http://guide.dhcuration.org/intro/</a>.))','Munoz - Question 2','','inherit','open','open','','4633-autosave','','','2013-06-15 22:36:52','2013-06-15 22:36:52','',4633,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4633-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(4636,3,'2013-06-15 21:47:23','2013-06-15 21:47:23','Carrying out digital research (almost all research is now at least semi-digital) requires that both scholars and information professionals understand how to manage and curate data over its entire lifetime of interest. At the least, individual scholars must be able to document their data curation strategies and evaluate those of collaborators and other purveyors of data.\r\n\r\nIn important ways, data curation is not new. Drawing on increasingly precise conceptual definitions of “data”—information systematically asserted as evidence. ((For extended discussion see Allen H. Renear, Simone Sacchi, and Karen M. Wickett, “Definitions of Dataset in the Scientific and Technical Literature,” <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 47, no. 1 (2010): 1-4, doi:10.1002/meet.14504701240; and Dubin, et al., “Content, Format, and Interpretation.”)) I would hope to convince those who are not primarily data curators that data curation is important to them because the theories and practices of data curation are crucial to communicating the enduring meaning and intent of any scholarship or research in ways that are authentic, contextualized, and complete. The first beneficiaries of data curation work are researchers themselves. Jason Scott from the Internet Archive has said that metadata is a “love note” to the future. ((Jason Scott, “The Metadata Mania,” <i>ASCII</i>, June 26, 2011, <a href=\"http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3181\">http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3181</a>.)) In terms of keeping research information comprehensible and usable, even to the person who created it, the future doesn’t need to be far distant, as anyone who has tried to decipher, some months later, a partial reference citation in his notes or tried to remember all the variables of her topic modeling experiment can attest. The strategies for data curation may be as simple as file-naming conventions, data replication, and very basic description. Or, the strategies may be as complicated as managing the integrity and renderability of large, complex 3D representations of information that cannot be recovered after its moment of collection, during the stages of an archaeological excavation, for example.\r\n\r\nMark Sample defines scholarship as “a creative or intellectual act [that is] public and circulates in a community of peers that evaluates and builds upon it.” ((Sample, “When Does Service Become Scholarship?”)) From this definition, it follows that scholarship depends on good data curation practice, which enables the dissemination and circulation of research products in ways that other scholars can build upon.\r\n\r\nI also hope to convince those who are not primarily data curators of the importance of data curation by appealing to the public trust. Much of the research happening in the United States is funded by the public. The resulting data does not belong only to the researcher who creates it, but is held by that person as a public trust. Data curation is part of the ethical responsibility of good research, and that should concern everyone.','Munoz - Question 3','Carrying out digital research (almost all research is now at least semi-digital) requires that both scholars and information professionals understand how to manage and curate data over its entire lifetime of interest. At the least, individual scholars must be able to document their data curation strategies and evaluate those of collaborators and other purveyors of data.','publish','open','open','','munoz-question-3','','','2013-06-22 04:33:58','2013-06-22 04:33:58','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=4636',0,'post','',0),(4637,3,'2013-06-15 21:47:21','2013-06-15 21:47:21','Carrying out digital research (almost all research is now at least semi-digital) requires that both scholars and information professionals understand how to manage and curate data over its entire lifetime of interest. At the least, individual scholars must be able to document their data curation strategies and evaluate those of collaborators and other purveyors of data.\n\nIn important ways, data curation is not new. Drawing on increasingly precise conceptual definitions of “data”—information systematically asserted as evidence ((For extended discussion see Allen H. Renear, Simone Sacchi, and Karen M. Wickett, “Definitions of Dataset in the Scientific and Technical Literature,” <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 47, no. 1 (2010): 1-4, doi:10.1002/meet.14504701240; and Dubin, et al., “Content, Format, and Interpretation.”)). I would hope to convince those who are not primarily data curators that data curation is important to them because the theories and practices of data curation are crucial to communicating the enduring meaning and intent of any scholarship or research in ways that are authentic, contextualized, and complete. The first beneficiaries of data curation work are researchers themselves. Jason Scott from the Internet Archive has said that metadata is a “love note” to the future ((Jason Scott, “The Metadata Mania,” <i>ASCII</i>, June 26, 2011, <a href=\"http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3181\">http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3181</a>.)). In terms of keeping research information comprehensible and usable, even to the person who created it, the future doesn’t need to be far distant, as anyone who has tried to decipher, some months later, a partial reference citation in his notes or tried to remember all the variables of her topic modeling experiment can attest. The strategies for data curation may be as simple as file-naming conventions, data replication, and very basic description. Or, the strategies may be as complicated as managing the integrity and renderability of large, complex 3D representations of information that cannot be recovered after its moment of collection, during the stages of an archaeological excavation, for example.\n\nMark Sample defines scholarship as “a creative or intellectual act [that is] public and circulates in a community of peers that evaluates and builds upon it.” ((Sample, “When Does Service Become Scholarship?”)) From this definition, it follows that scholarship depends on good data curation practice, which enables the dissemination and circulation of research products in ways that other scholars can build upon.\n\nI also hope to convince those who are not primarily data curators of the importance of data curation by appealing to the public trust. Much of the research happening in the United States is funded by the public. The resulting data does not belong only to the researcher who creates it, but is held by that person as a public trust. Data curation is part of the ethical responsibility of good research, and that should concern everyone.','Munoz - Question 3','','inherit','open','open','','4636-revision','','','2013-06-15 21:47:21','2013-06-15 21:47:21','',4636,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4636-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(4638,3,'2013-06-15 21:50:19','2013-06-15 21:50:19','Preparing the lectures for an introductory training course on data curation for humanists led to my most enlightening moment so far. In trying to explain the role of social factors in supporting preservation and the re-use of data, I started to see more points of convergence between data curation and work on “crowdsourcing” and closely related ideas of public humanities. This convergence is an effect of the changed information environment for “scholarly” data. Specifically, library and information science (LIS) represent a body of theory and practice on connecting users with information. ((Carole L. Palmer, Allen H. Renear, and Melissa H. Cragin, “Purposeful Curation: Research and Education for a Future with Working Data,” December 2, 2008, <a href=\"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/9764\">https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/9764</a>.)) New LIS research on questions of data “value,” which is closely tied to re-use and thus preservation, draws on this older tradition of service to user communities, to develop a thesis that “highly valuable research data are anti-fragile; they are capable of not just persisting over time but actually gaining in value as they are stressed via application to new settings, used in diverse contexts, and transferred amongst a network of systems.” ((Nicholas M. Weber, Karen S. Baker, Andrea K. Thomer, Tiffany C. Chao, and Carole L. Palmer. “Value and Context in Data Use: Domain Analysis Revisited,” <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 49, no. 1 (2012): 1–10. doi:10.1002/meet.14504901168.)) Attention is a crucial factor in the survival of any particular dataset. The current configuration of Internet technologies has lowered the barrier to the loosely coordinated publishing of information to platforms (like Wikipedia), and these now concentrate an immense amount of attention (due in part to the market dominance of Google’s particular search engine technology). Thus, my moment of enlightenment came from realizing that data curators should be asking what public, web-based resources need to be curated alongside “local” data in order to increase the integration of a research project with a larger information network, which is a public good or a “commons.” Curation of one’s own data might well mean working on someone else’s data—for example, by improving the coverage of women’s history in Wikipedia, ((Mia Ridge, “New Challenges in Digital History: Sharing Women’s History on Wikipedia - My Talk Notes,” <i>Open Objects</i>, March 23, 2013, <a href=\"http://openobjects.blogspot.com/2013/03/new-challenges-in-digital-history.html\">http://openobjects.blogspot.com/2013/03/new-challenges-in-digital-history.html</a>.)) which serves as a source, via things like DBpedia, for identifiers to be used in the “linked data cloud.”\r\n\r\nThe digital humanities exist at the intersection of computational technologies with the theories, practices, and research questions of the humanities. Digital humanists have been publishing scholarship to “the Web” since its inception (as documented through crucial early projects like <i><a href=\"http://vos.ucsb.edu/\">Voice of the Shuttle</a></i>). The persistence of interest on the part of digital humanists to put more of certain kinds of humanities scholarship into “public” spaces is supported by numerous examples. The enthusiasm for both using and providing application programming interfaces (APIs) to digitized collections, and in creating additions to massively popular publishing software such as WordPress for scholarly purposes, demonstrates this. In other words, the digital humanities engage with “the Web” for scholarly communication, advocacy, etc., but this engagement also has important curatorial and preservation consequences. Palmer, Renear, and Cragin envision that data curators “will build and maintain not only digital libraries and curated data sets, but also the associated indexing systems, metadata standards, ontologies, and retrieval systems.” ((Palmer, Renear, and Cragin, “Purposeful Curation: Research and Education for a Future with Working Data.”)) I would argue that these indexing systems and ontologies include open, web-based resources like Wikipedia (or maybe structured data resources derived from Wikipedia.) ((For example, <a href=\"http://www.freebase.com/\">http://www.freebase.com/</a>.)) Wikipedia is the quintessential “crowdsourced” project and its use as a shared data resource suggests that data curation needs will push scholars and librarians further toward participating in a public information sphere on the web as a way to support local datasets.','Munoz - Question 4','Preparing the lectures for an introductory training course on data curation for humanists led to my most enlightening moment so far. In trying to explain the role of social factors in supporting preservation and the re-use of data, I started to see more points of convergence between data curation and work on “crowdsourcing” and closely related ideas of public humanities. This convergence is an effect of the changed information environment for “scholarly” data.','publish','open','open','','munoz-question-4','','','2013-06-22 04:37:29','2013-06-22 04:37:29','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=4638',0,'post','',0),(4684,3,'2013-06-15 22:39:49','2013-06-15 22:39:49','Preparing the lectures for an introductory training course on data curation for humanists led to my most enlightening moment so far. In trying to explain the role of social factors in supporting preservation and the re-use of data, I started to see more points of convergence between data curation and work on “crowdsourcing” and closely related ideas of public humanities. This convergence is an effect of the changed information environment for “scholarly” data. Specifically, library and information science (LIS) represent a body of theory and practice on connecting users with information. ((Carole L. Palmer, Allen H. Renear, and Melissa H. Cragin, “Purposeful Curation: Research and Education for a Future with Working Data,” December 2, 2008, <a href=\"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/9764\">https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/9764</a>.)) New LIS research on questions of data “value,” which is closely tied to re-use and thus preservation, draws on this older tradition of service to user communities, to develop a thesis that “highly valuable research data are anti-fragile; they are capable of not just persisting over time but actually gaining in value as they are stressed via application to new settings, used in diverse contexts, and transferred amongst a network of systems.” ((Nicholas M. Weber, Karen S. Baker, Andrea K. Thomer, Tiffany C. Chao, and Carole L. Palmer. “Value and Context in Data Use: Domain Analysis Revisited,” <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 49, no. 1 (2012): 1–10. doi:10.1002/meet.14504901168.)) Attention is a crucial factor in the survival of any particular dataset. The current configuration of Internet technologies has lowered the barrier to the loosely coordinated publishing of information to platforms (like Wikipedia), and these now concentrate an immense amount of attention (due in part to the market dominance of Google’s particular search engine technology). Thus, my moment of enlightenment came from realizing that data curators should be asking what public, web-based resources need to be curated alongside “local” data in order to increase the integration of a research project with a larger information network, which is a public good or a “commons.” Curation of one’s own data might well mean working on someone else’s data—for example, by improving the coverage of women’s history in Wikipedia, ((Mia Ridge, “New Challenges in Digital History: Sharing Women’s History on Wikipedia - My Talk Notes,” <i>Open Objects</i>, March 23, 2013, <a href=\"http://openobjects.blogspot.com/2013/03/new-challenges-in-digital-history.html\">http://openobjects.blogspot.com/2013/03/new-challenges-in-digital-history.html</a>.)) which serves as a source, via things like DBpedia, for identifiers to be used in the “linked data cloud.”\r\n\r\nThe digital humanities exist at the intersection of computational technologies with the theories, practices, and research questions of the humanities. Digital humanists have been publishing scholarship to “the Web” since its inception (as documented through crucial early projects like <i><a href=\"http://vos.ucsb.edu/\">Voice of the Shuttle</a>)</i>. The persistence of interest on the part of digital humanists to put more of certain kinds of humanities scholarship into “public” spaces is supported by numerous examples. The enthusiasm for both using and providing application programming interfaces (APIs) to digitized collections, and in creating additions to massively popular publishing software such as WordPress for scholarly purposes, demonstrates this. In other words, the digital humanities engage with “the Web” for scholarly communication, advocacy, etc., but this engagement also has important curatorial and preservation consequences. Palmer, Renear, and Cragin envision that data curators “will build and maintain not only digital libraries and curated data sets, but also the associated indexing systems, metadata standards, ontologies, and retrieval systems.” ((Palmer, Renear, and Cragin, “Purposeful Curation: Research and Education for a Future with Working Data.”)) I would argue that these indexing systems and ontologies include open, web-based resources like Wikipedia (or maybe structured data resources derived from Wikipedia.) ((For example, <a href=\"http://www.freebase.com/\">http://www.freebase.com/</a>.)) Wikipedia is the quintessential “crowdsourced” project and its use as a shared data resource suggests that data curation needs will push scholars and librarians further toward participating in a public information sphere on the web as a way to support local datasets.','Munoz - Question 4','','inherit','open','open','','4638-revision-3','','','2013-06-15 22:39:49','2013-06-15 22:39:49','',4638,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4638-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(4640,3,'2013-06-15 21:51:10','2013-06-15 21:51:10','The biggest issues facing data curation now relate to the challenges of managing change. More than specifics of technology, infrastructure, staffing, or training, there is a general problem of how to transition organizations, work roles, and resource allocations from old configurations to new ones. Curating data requires supporting information work alongside other research tasks, from the inception of research projects to the (re)use of research products in the future. Does the model of liaison librarians attached to (often several) departments support the intensive work that this might require? Does the IT staff that colleges currently provide to faculty support this work? These are open questions. With the pressures for change in the technology and funding environments, we must be willing to look for new solutions in the prevailingly conservative atmosphere of the academy. Data curation will have to be addressed in tandem with other challenges, such as open access to research outcomes and a holistic critique of the conditions of labor in academia, exactly because data curation is a social as well as technical endeavor. So, to prepare the way for necessary changes in staffing, training, and infrastructure, the most pressing challenge for data curation is leadership.','Munoz - Question 5','The biggest issues facing data curation now relate to the challenges of managing change. More than specifics of technology, infrastructure, staffing, or training, there is a general problem of how to transition organizations, work roles, and resource allocations from old configurations to new ones. Curating data requires supporting information work alongside other research tasks, from the inception of research projects to the (re)use of research products in the future.','publish','open','open','','munoz-question-5','','','2013-06-22 04:35:38','2013-06-22 04:35:38','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=4640',0,'post','',0),(4641,3,'2013-06-15 21:50:32','2013-06-15 21:50:32','','Munoz - Question 5','','inherit','open','open','','4640-revision','','','2013-06-15 21:50:32','2013-06-15 21:50:32','',4640,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4640-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(4639,3,'2013-06-15 21:49:30','2013-06-15 21:49:30','Preparing the lectures for an introductory training course on data curation for humanists led to my most enlightening moment so far. In trying to explain the role of social factors in supporting preservation and the re-use of data, I started to see more points of convergence between data curation and work on “crowdsourcing” and closely related ideas of public humanities. This convergence is an effect of the changed information environment for “scholarly” data. Specifically, library and information science (LIS) represent a body of theory and practice on connecting users with information ((Carole L. Palmer, Allen H. Renear, and Melissa H. Cragin, “Purposeful Curation: Research and Education for a Future with Working Data,” December 2, 2008, <a href=\"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/9764\">https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/9764</a>.)). New LIS research on questions of data “value,” which is closely tied to re-use and thus preservation, draws on this older tradition of service to user communities, to develop a thesis that “highly valuable research data are anti-fragile; they are capable of not just persisting over time but actually gaining in value as they are stressed via application to new settings, used in diverse contexts, and transferred amongst a network of systems.” ((Nicholas M. Weber, Karen S. Baker, Andrea K. Thomer, Tiffany C. Chao, and Carole L. Palmer. “Value and Context in Data Use: Domain Analysis Revisited,” <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 49, no. 1 (2012): 1–10. doi:10.1002/meet.14504901168.)) Attention is a crucial factor in the survival of any particular dataset. The current configuration of Internet technologies has lowered the barrier to the loosely coordinated publishing of information to platforms (like Wikipedia), and these now concentrate an immense amount of attention (due in part to the market dominance of Google’s particular search engine technology). Thus, my moment of enlightenment came from realizing that data curators should be asking what public, web-based resources need to be curated alongside “local” data in order to increase the integration of a research project with a larger information network, which is a public good or a “commons.” Curation of one’s own data might well mean working on someone else’s data—for example, by improving the coverage of women’s history in Wikipedia, ((Mia Ridge, “New Challenges in Digital History: Sharing Women’s History on Wikipedia - My Talk Notes,” <i>Open Objects</i>, March 23, 2013, <a href=\"http://openobjects.blogspot.com/2013/03/new-challenges-in-digital-history.html\">http://openobjects.blogspot.com/2013/03/new-challenges-in-digital-history.html</a>.)) which serves as a source, via things like DBpedia, for identifiers to be used in the “linked data cloud”.\n\nThe digital humanities exist at the intersection of computational technologies with the theories, practices, and research questions of the humanities. Digital humanists have been publishing scholarship to “the Web” since its inception (as documented through crucial early projects like <i>Voice of the Shuttle </i>[link to: <a href=\"http://vos.ucsb.edu/\">http://vos.ucsb.edu/</a>]). The persistence of interest on the part of digital humanists to put more of certain kinds of humanities scholarship into “public” spaces is supported by numerous examples. The enthusiam for both using and providing application programming interfaces (APIs) to digitized collections, and in creating additions to massively popular publishing software such as WordPress for scholarly purposes, demonstrates this. In other words, the digital humanities engage with “the Web” for scholarly communication, advocacy, etc., but this engagement also has important curatorial and preservation consequences. Palmer, Renear, and Cragin envision that data curators “will build and maintain not only digital libraries and curated data sets, but also the associated indexing systems, metadata standards, ontologies, and retrieval systems.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn4\"><sup><sup>[iv]</sup></sup></a> I would argue that these indexing systems and ontologies include open, web-based resources like Wikipedia (or maybe structured data resources derived from Wikipedia.)<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn5\"><sup><sup>[v]</sup></sup></a> Wikipedia is the quintessential “crowdsourced” project and its use as a shared data resource suggests that data curation needs will push scholars and librarians further toward participating in a public information sphere on the web as a way to support local datasets.\n<div><br clear=\"all\" />\n\n<hr align=\"left\" size=\"1\" width=\"33%\" />\n\n<div>\n\nPalmer, Renear, and Cragin, “Purposeful Curation: Research and Education for a Future with Working Data.”\n\n</div>\n<div>\n\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref5\"><sup><sup>[v]</sup></sup></a> For example, http://www.freebase.com/.\n\n</div>\n</div>','Munoz - Question 4','','inherit','open','open','','4638-revision','','','2013-06-15 21:49:30','2013-06-15 21:49:30','',4638,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4638-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(4642,3,'2013-06-15 21:52:15','2013-06-15 21:52:15','The biggest issues facing data curation now relate to the challenges of managing change. More than specifics of technology, infrastructure, staffing, or training, there is a general problem of how to transition organizations, work roles, and resource allocations from old configurations to new ones. Curating data requires supporting information work alongside other research tasks, from the inception of research projects to the (re)use of research products in the future. Does the model of liaison librarians attached to (often several) departments support the intensive work that this might require? Does the IT staff that colleges currently provide to faculty support this work? These are open questions. With the pressures for change in the technology and funding environments, we must be willing to look for new solutions in the prevailingly conservative atmosphere of the academy. Data curation will have to be addressed in tandem with other challenges, such as open access to research outcomes and a holistic critique of the conditions of labor in academia, exactly because data curation is a social as well as technical endeavor. So, to prepare the way for necessary changes in staffing, training, and infrastructure, the most pressing challenge for data curation is leadership.','Munoz - Question 5','','inherit','open','open','','4640-autosave','','','2013-06-15 21:52:15','2013-06-15 21:52:15','',4640,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4640-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(4643,3,'2013-06-15 21:56:34','2013-06-15 21:56:34','How is data curation a part of your job?','Data Curation - Question 1','','publish','open','open','','data-curation-question-1','','','2013-07-09 01:57:44','2013-07-09 01:57:44','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=4643',0,'post','',0),(4644,3,'2013-06-15 21:53:54','2013-06-15 21:53:54','','Question 1','','inherit','open','open','','4643-revision','','','2013-06-15 21:53:54','2013-06-15 21:53:54','',4643,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4643-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(4645,3,'2013-06-15 21:56:01','2013-06-15 21:56:01','How is data curation a part of your job?','Data Curation - Question 1','','inherit','open','open','','4643-revision-2','','','2013-06-15 21:56:01','2013-06-15 21:56:01','',4643,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4643-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(4646,3,'2013-06-15 21:58:44','2013-06-15 21:58:44','In your role, are the main pressures on and needs of data curation the same across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities?','Data Curation - Question 2','','publish','open','open','','data-curation-question-2','','','2013-07-09 01:57:38','2013-07-09 01:57:38','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=4646',0,'post','',0),(4647,3,'2013-06-15 21:58:18','2013-06-15 21:58:18','In your role, are the main pressures on and needs of data curation the same across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities?','Data Curation - Question 2','','inherit','open','open','','4646-revision','','','2013-06-15 21:58:18','2013-06-15 21:58:18','',4646,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4646-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(4648,3,'2013-06-15 21:29:25','2013-06-15 21:29:25','I think the biggest issue is us, people. We are capable of building sophisticated tools and infrastructures, but because data curation is a collective enterprise and a long-term dynamic system, we constantly need to negotiate our goals, needs, values, and attitudes. There are many social, political, and historical reasons for data curation to fail or succeed. We need to be aware of that.\r\n\r\nMy view on the biggest issue facing data curation is aligned with insights from the history and sociology of science. Many publications have expressed this view, but Edwards, Jackson, Bowker, and Knobel’s report on challenges regarding infrastructures is probably most relevant to the issue of data stewardship ((Paul N. Edwards, Steven J Jackson, Geoffrey C Bowker, and Cory P Knobel, “Report of a Workshop on ‘History &amp; Theory of Infrastructure : Lessons for New Scientific Cyberinfrastructures’ January 2007,” <i>Design</i> 20 (January 2007): 1-50, <a href=\"http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/49353\">http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/49353</a>.)). It is also more useful and interesting to consider not just data, but a broader range of products, or what Bechhover et al. call “research objects,” such as publications, data, code and algorithms, workflows, and so on ((Sean Bechhofer, David De Roure, Matthew Gamble, Carole Goble, and Iain Buchan, “Research Objects: Towards Exchange and Reuse of Digital Knowledge,” <i>Nature Proceedings</i> (2010), <a href=\"http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268555/\">http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268555/</a>.)).\r\n\r\nAs a complex system, research-object curation involves tensions, such as those between immediate and long-term goals of development, between global and local implementations, and between planned versus emergent changes in the system. To negotiate these, the system needs actors in different roles, including technical experts, managers, and “champions” who stimulate interest and promote adoption. During systemic growth, users and user communities can become critical to success or failure.\r\n\r\nData curation is embedded in social and institutional practices and norms, none of which change more slowly than communication and data-processing technologies. These discontinuities may be part of the reason why culture of sharing and making data public has not been widely adopted, and they may also become obstacles in creating such a culture in the future. As people, practices, and norms play a formative role in data curation, it is important to remember that there are always “winners” and “losers.” Some people initiate and adopt innovation and change, while others resist it and find it hard to fit in. To quote Edwards et al., “It is also possible that a tech-centered approach to the challenge of data sharing inclines us toward failure from the beginning, because it leaves untouched underlying questions of incentives, organization, and culture that have in fact <i>always </i>structured the nature and viability of distributed scientific work\" ((Edwards et al, “Report of a Workshop,” 32.)).\r\n\r\nPaths to solutions that Edwards et al. hint at include historical and sociological awareness; the consolidation of local systems and tools; the development of bridges and gateways, as well as boundary workers who can act as “bridge-builders” and “translators”; and more flexibility and collaboration. The question that data curators need to ask themselves is, “Are we playing a role in any of these?”','Kouper - Question 5','','inherit','open','open','','4609-revision-2','','','2013-06-15 21:29:25','2013-06-15 21:29:25','',4609,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4609-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(4649,3,'2013-06-15 21:29:46','2013-06-15 21:29:46','I find all aspects of my work enlightening: working in large and small collaborations, interacting with diverse groups of people, building tools to address the needs of different communities, engaging with researchers, and trying to understand the similarities and differences in data practices across epistemic cultures.\r\n\r\nI value the diversity of opportunities that my work gives me. At the same time, it is hard to act on different opportunities and go outside of academic circles. So far I have been working mostly with researchers, other data curators, and managers at research institutions. I am looking forward to engaging more with the second group of data users that I mentioned above—those who benefit from data availability but do not necessarily collect or disseminate data. I am interested in such projects as citizen science or participatory data stewardship, but I recently realized that such projects may take more planning, time, energy, and so on.\r\n\r\nI had only a few preliminary encounters with non-academic data users, but as I try to get more information about possible ways of engagement, it is very interesting to see how channels and modes of communication as well as perspectives on data may differ. For example, I recently had a conversation with an executive director of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners ESIP (http://www.esipfed.org/) about the importance of sharing earth science data with users such as police offices, disaster management forces, and so on. She had a great idea of organizing an event within the ESIP annual meeting, where such users would come and work together on a shared set of data, using scenarios or something else. Possible outcomes could be a framework, a set of requirements, or even infrastructure modules that would help to use earth science data in non-research contexts. As we discussed this possible project, I realized that most of the existing recommendations of how to engage users in data stewardship are for working with researchers and addressing their needs. We need to address the needs of other user groups so that they become agents in data stewardship as well. One interesting example of that sort of project is a recent data management guide for citizen scientists ((DataONE Public Participation in Scientific Research Working Group, “Data Management Guide for Citizen Scientists,” February, 2013, <a href=\"http://www.dataone.org/sites/all/documents/DataONE-PPSR-DataManagementGuide.pdf\">http://www.dataone.org/sites/all/documents/DataONE-PPSR-DataManagementGuide.pdf</a>.)).','Kouper - Question 4','','inherit','open','open','','4607-revision-3','','','2013-06-15 21:29:46','2013-06-15 21:29:46','',4607,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4607-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(4650,3,'2013-06-15 21:30:01','2013-06-15 21:30:01','This question can apply to two groups: those who are involved in data collection, analysis, or storage, but who do not see curation as one of their primary activities (researchers, students, or librarians); or those who benefit from data availability, but who use it primarily to make decisions in their non-data-oriented work (administrators, policy makers, or the larger public).\r\n\r\nThe former group works with data at the earlier stages of the data life cycle. Curation is important for them because of the changes in the system and the relative value of epistemic products. We curate, or take care of, epistemic products and objects, such as publications or material samples, because they are valuable to the research community over time. Data are a crucial component of reproducible and trustworthy research, and when they are reused in other research they minimize the cost of data collection. Therefore, it is important to curate data at the earlier stages of the research life cycle if we want rigor and accountability in research. In this sense, data curation is just another component of the collective enterprise called science that builds upon prior work and constructs knowledge by testing, proving, and falsifying hypotheses and theories.\r\n\r\nHaving said that, I think that we still have a long way to go to recognize the collective value of research data. In many areas of inquiry, data are still rather private, intended for internal use not public communication. Patterns of private use are usually different from those of public use. We may pile up books and magazines in our bedroom, but we would probably put some thought into arranging them in the living room and probably make sure they fit with the overall décor. If we keep thinking about data as something for private use and try to curate them afterwards, we will always end up with “piles” that require a lot of effort to organize and incorporate into the overall ecology of research products. Such data will always be difficult to discover and use. That is why we need to find ways to make data open for public use and discussion; mandates from funding agencies are not sufficient in this regard.\r\n\r\nFor the latter group of decision makers and the public, the argument for data curation is similar to the argument about the importance of science: Having well-preserved data that are easy to discover and work with helps us join efforts and better explain and understand the world, which ultimately improves our lives and our future.','Kouper - Question 3','','inherit','open','open','','4605-revision-3','','','2013-06-15 21:30:01','2013-06-15 21:30:01','',4605,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4605-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(4651,3,'2013-06-15 21:30:08','2013-06-15 21:30:08','From a data curation perspective, the distinctions between the sciences, social sciences, and humanities are getting more and more blurred. Many of our projects at D2I aim to facilitate cross-disciplinarily and problem-based research. If someone is working on solving problems of food insecurity or flood management, they would benefit from using heterogeneous data gathered from satellites, sensors, interviews, surveys, and published documents. They could also benefit from a digital environment where they can combine methods, such as statistical analysis, data mining, and visualizations.\r\n\r\nObviously, data curation can be domain specific; for example, descriptions of geosciences data would be different from descriptions of sociological surveys. At the same time, it seems more useful to talk about the pressures on and need for curating various types of data, such as images; spatial, temporal, and textual data; audio and video; databases; heterogeneous datasets; and so on. Identifying differences and similarities in the curation of various types of data would allow us to create more integrated environments for sharing and analyzing data across disciplines, fields, and institutions.\r\n\r\nIn addition to data types, pressures and needs relating to data curation cluster around the size of datasets, data sensitivity, and researchers’ awareness of the need for data stewardship.\r\n\r\n<b>Size of data.</b> There are many discussions around so-called big data versus small or long-tail data. In the business world, big data are often defined along the dimensions of three Vs: volume, velocity, and variety ((Doug Laney, “3D Data Management: Controlling Volume, Velocity and Variety,” <i>Gartner Blog Network</i>, February 6, 2001, <a href=\"Doug Laney, “3D Data Management: Controlling Volume, Velocity and Variety,” Gartner Blog Network, February 6, 2001, http://blogs.gartner.com/doug-laney/files/2012/01/ad949-3D-Data-Management-Controlling-Data-Volume-Velocity-and-Variety.pdf.\">http://blogs.gartner.com/doug-laney/files/2012/01/ad949-3D-Data-Management-Controlling-Data-Volume-Velocity-and-Variety.pdf</a>.)). Big data are the data that are so large, quickly accumulating, and complex that they require different approaches in storage, analysis, and curation, whether dealing with a massive amount of texts in a digital humanities database or high-resolution images in astronomy. Long-tail data have their own challenges. They may be easy to store on one computer, but because they are often collected for individual studies, they may be very heterogeneous in variables and observation points they cover. In data curation, it is hard to figure out how to integrate such data into a single environment. As Katherine Akers pointed out in her recent essay, small data are messy, but they are important; once they are meaningfully preserved and integrated, they can contribute as much if not more to our knowledge as big data ((Katherine Akers, “Looking Out for the Little Guy: Small Data Curation,” <i>Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i>, February/March 2013, <a href=\"http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Feb-13/FebMar13_RDAP_Akers.html\">http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Feb-13/FebMar13_RDAP_Akers.html</a>.)).\r\n\r\n<b>Data sensitivity.</b> This is related to the idea of open access to the products of scholarly activities. Proponents argue that open access is beneficial for the advancement of knowledge as well as for the existence of an informed and educated citizenry. Should the ideals and policies of open access be applied to data? Access to data might be more complicated than access to published materials, because knowledge about human subjects or certain areas of the planet can be harmful when widely shared. When thinking about data curation, it is important to develop a framework to address multiple levels of data sensitivity and promote research and education without causing more problems than solutions.\r\n\r\n<b>Researchers’ awareness.</b> Research communities vary by their awareness and acceptance of the need to share and curate data. For example, in some disciplines such as climatology or astronomy, the frameworks for data exchanges are much more developed. Climate models rely on the three-dimensional grid that represents and calculates atmospheric, oceanic, and chemical information from around the world ((NOAA\'s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, “Modeling Climate,” last modified March 7, 2011, <a href=\"http://www.research.noaa.gov/climate/t_modeling.html\">http://www.research.noaa.gov/climate/t_modeling.html</a>.)). No one—be it a person, a team, or an institution—can collect such data on his or her own. That is why climate-modeling efforts are coordinated on the local, national, and international levels and climate data are stored and documented quite well.\r\n\r\nIn other disciplines, data efforts are still much more localized. At D2I, we have been working with social-ecological data, particularly in one database that contains information from around the world and spans almost two decades. It is a single database and researchers add information using a standardized instrument. Nevertheless, the variation within this database is immense because researchers collect data for their individual projects and adapt the instrument accordingly. When other researchers consult this database to retrieve data for their individual projects, they do not know what is available to them based on their requirements. And we as data curators and tool developers do not necessarily know how to facilitate their queries and make the database better to navigate and share. Hopefully, as more and more researchers become aware of the importance of sharing their data, we will be able to engage them and create integrated solutions for various communities.','Kouper - Question 2','','inherit','open','open','','4603-revision-3','','','2013-06-15 21:30:08','2013-06-15 21:30:08','',4603,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4603-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(4652,3,'2013-06-15 21:30:14','2013-06-15 21:30:14','Three factors shape my perspective on data curation: my research interest in the changes in knowledge production over time and across domains; the goals of my CLIR/DLF postdoctoral fellowship; and the mission and activities of the research center where I work, the <a href=\"http://d2i.indiana.edu\">Data to Insight Center</a> (D2I) at Indiana University Bloomington.\r\n\r\nAs a data curation fellow at D2I, I help develop tools and best practices for data management, sharing, and preservation; I conduct research in the areas of data analytics and stewardship as well as digital humanities and digital libraries; and I advance data curation as both an important component of science and as a professional activity.\r\n\r\nMy primary involvement is with the <a href=\"http://sead-data.net\">Sustainable Environment, Actionable Data</a> (SEAD) project. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded SEAD to create national and global data research infrastructure via the program “Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners (DataNet).” SEAD is a collaboration between the University of Michigan, Indiana University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that works to develop a digital environment that will support data curation and management workflows in sustainability science. D2I is developing Virtual Archive, a solution that provides federated deposit and access capabilities across multiple institutional repositories. A researcher or data curator can use Virtual Archive to automatically deposit data in one of the partner repositories or to search across those repositories and find the data that they need.\r\n\r\nFor SEAD Virtual Archive, I co-lead architectural, policy, and user-engagement activities and solutions. For example, I use my metadata and information organization expertise to improve the Virtual Archive data model and interface to support the dual needs of researchers and data curators. Currently, we are working on identifying layers of semantic information, such as the relationships between different data types within a dataset or the possible uses of data, which can help to describe heterogeneous or multi-variable datasets in sustainability science. I also use my expertise in social theory and the sociology of knowledge to identify barriers in data sharing and find suitable approaches to data sharing and preservation in relevant SEAD disciplines, such as ecology or hydrology.\r\n\r\nI am also involved in the <a href=\"http://d2i.indiana.edu/hathitrust-research-center\">HathiTrust Research Center</a> (HTRC) project. This project develops cyberinfrastructure to support the digital humanities in their work with massive amounts of texts derived from the HathiTrust Digital Library. My role in this project is primarily concerned with engagement and community development. If we want this project to succeed, it is crucial to let the community know about this environment and its capabilities, gather feedback so that we can continue improving it, and perhaps learn together about innovative research opportunities in text computations.\r\n\r\nEngagement and outreach are crucial for my data curation work. Many efforts to facilitate data sharing and preservation exist, yet it is still a relatively new component of scholarship and research. I work to help articulate the value of sharing and preserving data to research communities and to create opportunities to do so. We often talk about how important it is to ground our data tools in actual use cases, so I spend a significant amount of time thinking about how to connect to researchers and their data practices, how to find “data champions,” and how to create a framework to engage researchers in data exchanges. The latter is the focus of my efforts as an active member of the new global initiative called Research Data Alliance (RDA) (http://rd-alliance.org), within which I, along with others, formed an engagement interest group. We had a successful planning meeting during the RDA plenary in March, and about 26 data practitioners and scientists attended. We shared many interesting ideas, such as creating a library of best practices and solutions. Our group is still in the early stages of development and we invite all who are interested to join ((RDA-Engage forum thread can found <a href=\"http://forum.rd-alliance.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&amp;t=26\">here</a>; to subscribe to the RDA-Engage mailing list visit <a href=\"http://lists.lists.rd-alliance.org/mailman/listinfo/rda-cwg-engage\">here</a>)).\r\n<div><br clear=\"all\" />\r\n</div>','Kouper - Question 1','','inherit','open','open','','4601-revision-3','','','2013-06-15 21:30:14','2013-06-15 21:30:14','',4601,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4601-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(4653,3,'2013-06-15 22:01:35','2013-06-15 22:01:35','Why is data curation important to non-data curators?','Data Curation - Question 3','','publish','open','open','','data-curation-question-3','','','2013-06-15 22:01:35','2013-06-15 22:01:35','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=4653',0,'post','',0),(4654,3,'2013-06-15 22:00:09','2013-06-15 22:00:09','','Data Curation - Question 3','','inherit','open','open','','4653-revision','','','2013-06-15 22:00:09','2013-06-15 22:00:09','',4653,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4653-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(4655,3,'2013-06-15 22:02:38','2013-06-15 22:02:38','What has been your most enlightening moment in your work with data curation?','Data Curation - Question 4','','publish','open','open','','data-curation-question-4','','','2013-07-09 01:57:31','2013-07-09 01:57:31','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=4655',0,'post','',0),(4656,3,'2013-06-15 22:01:57','2013-06-15 22:01:57','','Data Curation - Question 4','','inherit','open','open','','4655-revision','','','2013-06-15 22:01:57','2013-06-15 22:01:57','',4655,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4655-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(4657,3,'2013-06-15 22:03:26','2013-06-15 22:03:26','What is the biggest issue facing data curation now: technology, infrastructure, staffing, training, or something else?','Data Curation - Question 5','','publish','open','open','','data-curation-question-5','','','2013-06-15 22:03:26','2013-06-15 22:03:26','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=4657',0,'post','',0),(4658,3,'2013-06-15 22:02:53','2013-06-15 22:02:53','','Data Curation - Question 5','','inherit','open','open','','4657-revision','','','2013-06-15 22:02:53','2013-06-15 22:02:53','',4657,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4657-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(4659,3,'2013-06-15 22:04:30','2013-06-15 22:04:30','What is the biggest issue facing data curation now: technology, infrastructure, staffing, training, or something else?','Data Curation - Question 5','','inherit','open','open','','4657-autosave','','','2013-06-15 22:04:30','2013-06-15 22:04:30','',4657,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4657-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(4660,3,'2013-06-15 21:33:24','2013-06-15 21:33:24','As Digital Archivist, my main responsibilities and most immediate priorities concern the management of born-digital materials acquired in archival collections. Over the past year, I have focused on building a foundation of policies, procedures, and workflows to guide the process of acquiring digital materials from donors and establishing initial administrative, physical, and intellectual control over these materials. I have drawn from the final report of the AIMS - Born Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship project, ((AIMS Work Group, “AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship,” 2012, accessed January 8, 2013, <a href=\"http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/AIMS_final.pdf\">http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/AIMS_final.pdf</a>.)) which has come up with a framework to assist current practitioners in designing and implementing policies and workflows to acquire, process, preserve, and provide access to born-digital materials. I have created local implementations of the methods and documents outlined in the AIMS report, including a donor survey instrument to collect important contextual information during the acquisition process. I have also implemented digital forensics hardware and software tools to help maintain the authenticity and integrity of digital materials when transferring them from the donor to the archives.\r\n\r\nAnother resource I have used to guide my work is the Digital Curation Centre’s Curation Lifecycle Model, which is a visual representation of a “high level overview of the stages required for successful curation and preservation of data from initial conceptualisation through the iterative curation cycle((“What is the Digital Curation Lifecycle Model,” Digital Curation Centre, accessed February 12, 2013, <a href=\"http://www.dcc.ac.uk/digital-curation/digital-curation-faqs/dcc-curation-lifecycle-model\">http://www.dcc.ac.uk/digital-curation/digital-curation-faqs/dcc-curation-lifecycle-model</a>.)).” In relation to actions within the Curation Lifecycle Model, most of my recent data curation activities fall within creating or receiving data, appraising and selecting data, ingesting data, and preserving data. The conceptual framework articulated in this model has informed my workflow design activities, where I have attempted to ensure that discrete actions are logically integrated into an overall comprehensive system for managing born-digital materials.\r\n\r\nWhile my main focus has been on the curation of born-digital materials within hybrid archival collections, this is a foundational element of a comprehensive program to guide the long-term preservation and access to all the digital content that the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library produces and acquires. As Digital Archivist in a medium-sized academic library, I am in an excellent position to lead a collaborative effort to develop and implement a sustainable digital preservation program. Having established policies, procedures, and workflows within the Archives and Special Collections department, in the coming months I will be shifting my data curation activities towards organization-wide tasks. These activities will include the development and implementation of a digital preservation policy framework and technological infrastructure to support ongoing preservation and access services.\r\n\r\nIn my particular organizational context, I am the champion for ensuring that preservation actions are integrated into the workflows of the multiple content streams that are currently part of Library services. This includes helping to revise our digitization workflows and policies to ensure that digital objects are created according to standards and best practices and incorporating the capture and management of metadata needed to ensure current and future access. In addition, I am participating in the development of a Library-managed institutional repository service, a new direction and new content stream for the Library. In a similar manner, my contribution to this project involves ensuring that the preservation and access needs of users are integrated into the design and functions of the hardware and software that underlies this new service.','Meister - Question 1','','inherit','open','open','','4621-revision-2','','','2013-06-15 21:33:24','2013-06-15 21:33:24','',4621,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4621-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(4662,3,'2013-06-15 22:08:13','2013-06-15 22:08:13','As Digital Archivist, my main responsibilities and most immediate priorities concern the management of born-digital materials acquired in archival collections. Over the past year, I have focused on building a foundation of policies, procedures, and workflows to guide the process of acquiring digital materials from donors and establishing initial administrative, physical, and intellectual control over these materials. I have drawn from the final report of the AIMS - Born Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship project, ((AIMS Work Group, “AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship,” 2012, accessed January 8, 2013, <a href=\"http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/AIMS_final.pdf\">http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/AIMS_final.pdf</a>.)) which has come up with a framework to assist current practitioners in designing and implementing policies and workflows to acquire, process, preserve, and provide access to born-digital materials. I have created local implementations of the methods and documents outlined in the AIMS report, including a donor survey instrument to collect important contextual information during the acquisition process. I have also implemented digital forensics hardware and software tools to help maintain the authenticity and integrity of digital materials when transferring them from the donor to the archives.\r\n\r\nAnother resource I have used to guide my work is the Digital Curation Centre’s Curation Lifecycle Model, which is a visual representation of a “high level overview of the stages required for successful curation and preservation of data from initial conceptualisation through the iterative curation cycle.\" ((“What is the Digital Curation Lifecycle Model,” Digital Curation Centre, accessed February 12, 2013, <a href=\"http://www.dcc.ac.uk/digital-curation/digital-curation-faqs/dcc-curation-lifecycle-model\">http://www.dcc.ac.uk/digital-curation/digital-curation-faqs/dcc-curation-lifecycle-model</a>.)) In relation to actions within the Curation Lifecycle Model, most of my recent data curation activities fall within creating or receiving data, appraising and selecting data, ingesting data, and preserving data. The conceptual framework articulated in this model has informed my workflow design activities, where I have attempted to ensure that discrete actions are logically integrated into an overall comprehensive system for managing born-digital materials.\r\n\r\nWhile my main focus has been on the curation of born-digital materials within hybrid archival collections, this is a foundational element of a comprehensive program to guide the long-term preservation and access to all the digital content that the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library produces and acquires. As Digital Archivist in a medium-sized academic library, I am in an excellent position to lead a collaborative effort to develop and implement a sustainable digital preservation program. Having established policies, procedures, and workflows within the Archives and Special Collections department, in the coming months I will be shifting my data curation activities towards organization-wide tasks. These activities will include the development and implementation of a digital preservation policy framework and technological infrastructure to support ongoing preservation and access services.\r\n\r\nIn my particular organizational context, I am the champion for ensuring that preservation actions are integrated into the workflows of the multiple content streams that are currently part of Library services. This includes helping to revise our digitization workflows and policies to ensure that digital objects are created according to standards and best practices and incorporating the capture and management of metadata needed to ensure current and future access. In addition, I am participating in the development of a Library-managed institutional repository service, a new direction and new content stream for the Library. In a similar manner, my contribution to this project involves ensuring that the preservation and access needs of users are integrated into the design and functions of the hardware and software that underlies this new service.','Meister - Question 1','','inherit','open','open','','4621-revision-4','','','2013-06-15 22:08:13','2013-06-15 22:08:13','',4621,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4621-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(4661,3,'2013-06-15 22:07:30','2013-06-15 22:07:30','As Digital Archivist, my main responsibilities and most immediate priorities concern the management of born-digital materials acquired in archival collections. Over the past year, I have focused on building a foundation of policies, procedures, and workflows to guide the process of acquiring digital materials from donors and establishing initial administrative, physical, and intellectual control over these materials. I have drawn from the final report of the AIMS - Born Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship project, ((AIMS Work Group, “AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship,” 2012, accessed January 8, 2013, <a href=\"http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/AIMS_final.pdf\">http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/AIMS_final.pdf</a>.)) which has come up with a framework to assist current practitioners in designing and implementing policies and workflows to acquire, process, preserve, and provide access to born-digital materials. I have created local implementations of the methods and documents outlined in the AIMS report, including a donor survey instrument to collect important contextual information during the acquisition process. I have also implemented digital forensics hardware and software tools to help maintain the authenticity and integrity of digital materials when transferring them from the donor to the archives.\r\n\r\nAnother resource I have used to guide my work is the Digital Curation Centre’s Curation Lifecycle Model, which is a visual representation of a “high level overview of the stages required for successful curation and preservation of data from initial conceptualisation through the iterative curation cycle ((“What is the Digital Curation Lifecycle Model,” Digital Curation Centre, accessed February 12, 2013, <a href=\"http://www.dcc.ac.uk/digital-curation/digital-curation-faqs/dcc-curation-lifecycle-model\">http://www.dcc.ac.uk/digital-curation/digital-curation-faqs/dcc-curation-lifecycle-model</a>.)).” In relation to actions within the Curation Lifecycle Model, most of my recent data curation activities fall within creating or receiving data, appraising and selecting data, ingesting data, and preserving data. The conceptual framework articulated in this model has informed my workflow design activities, where I have attempted to ensure that discrete actions are logically integrated into an overall comprehensive system for managing born-digital materials.\r\n\r\nWhile my main focus has been on the curation of born-digital materials within hybrid archival collections, this is a foundational element of a comprehensive program to guide the long-term preservation and access to all the digital content that the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library produces and acquires. As Digital Archivist in a medium-sized academic library, I am in an excellent position to lead a collaborative effort to develop and implement a sustainable digital preservation program. Having established policies, procedures, and workflows within the Archives and Special Collections department, in the coming months I will be shifting my data curation activities towards organization-wide tasks. These activities will include the development and implementation of a digital preservation policy framework and technological infrastructure to support ongoing preservation and access services.\r\n\r\nIn my particular organizational context, I am the champion for ensuring that preservation actions are integrated into the workflows of the multiple content streams that are currently part of Library services. This includes helping to revise our digitization workflows and policies to ensure that digital objects are created according to standards and best practices and incorporating the capture and management of metadata needed to ensure current and future access. In addition, I am participating in the development of a Library-managed institutional repository service, a new direction and new content stream for the Library. In a similar manner, my contribution to this project involves ensuring that the preservation and access needs of users are integrated into the design and functions of the hardware and software that underlies this new service.','Meister - Question 1','','inherit','open','open','','4621-revision-3','','','2013-06-15 22:07:30','2013-06-15 22:07:30','',4621,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4621-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(4663,3,'2013-06-15 21:34:26','2013-06-15 21:34:26','In our university community context, the colleges and departments within the sciences often have established data management practices, including utilizing national discipline-specific data repositories to manage and share data. In contrast, those working in the social sciences and humanities often have limited resources to put towards data curation needs. For these disciplines in particular, the Library has an excellent opportunity to play an important role as a data curation and preservation service provider.\r\n\r\nMuch of my knowledge and understanding on the data curation needs of different disciplines within my specific institutional setting have come from my role in the development of a library-managed institutional repository service. During this development process my colleagues and I have worked to collect information on the faculty, student, and staff interest in, and specific needs related to, a potential institutional repository service. Through a survey of liaison librarians and a series of meetings with key administrative stakeholders from university colleges and schools, we have collected valuable information on current institutional needs, including specific data curation needs. While informal, this information has provided an initial sense of the needs of our particular university community.\r\n\r\nThe initial focus of our institutional repository service will likely be on increasing access to intellectual outputs, but there is strong potential to provide additional assistance and guidance during earlier stages of the research and creative process. Our information gathering highlighted that data curation needs may also be different across faculty, graduate, and undergraduate groups. For example, in our case, there is strong interest in an institutional repository service from a humanities unit, the School of Media Arts, as a platform for showcasing and increasing access to undergraduate student work. During initial conversations, faculty members from this department articulated a desire to maintain access to undergraduate work both for internal teaching needs and to give it more exposure to media-arts industry audiences. The library can help provide ongoing sustainable access by ensuring the long-term preservation of these materials through our institutional repository service. The next steps are to increase the participation of various groups and disciplines in the development of this institutional repository service to ensure that it meets their particular data curation needs.','Meister - Question 2','','inherit','open','open','','4623-revision-2','','','2013-06-15 21:34:26','2013-06-15 21:34:26','',4623,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4623-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(4664,3,'2013-06-15 22:09:44','2013-06-15 22:09:44','As Digital Archivist, my main responsibilities and most immediate priorities concern the management of born-digital materials acquired in archival collections. Over the past year, I have focused on building a foundation of policies, procedures, and workflows to guide the process of acquiring digital materials from donors and establishing initial administrative, physical, and intellectual control over these materials. I have drawn from the final report of the AIMS - Born Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship project, ((AIMS Work Group, “AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship,” 2012, accessed January 8, 2013, <a href=\"http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/AIMS_final.pdf\">http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/AIMS_final.pdf</a>.)) which has come up with a framework to assist current practitioners in designing and implementing policies and workflows to acquire, process, preserve, and provide access to born-digital materials. I have created local implementations of the methods and documents outlined in the AIMS report, including a donor survey instrument to collect important contextual information during the acquisition process. I have also implemented digital forensics hardware and software tools to help maintain the authenticity and integrity of digital materials when transferring them from the donor to the archives.\r\n\r\nAnother resource I have used to guide my work is the Digital Curation Centre’s Curation Lifecycle Model, which is a visual representation of a “high level overview of the stages required for successful curation and preservation of data from initial conceptualisation through the iterative curation cycle.\" ((“What is the Digital Curation Lifecycle Model,” Digital Curation Centre, accessed February 12, 2013, <a href=\"http://www.dcc.ac.uk/digital-curation/digital-curation-faqs/dcc-curation-lifecycle-model\">http://www.dcc.ac.uk/digital-curation/digital-curation-faqs/dcc-curation-lifecycle-model</a>.)) In relation to actions within the Curation Lifecycle Model, most of my recent data curation activities fall within creating or receiving data, appraising and selecting data, ingesting data, and preserving data. The conceptual framework articulated in this model has informed my workflow design activities, where I have attempted to ensure that discrete actions are logically integrated into an overall comprehensive system for managing born-digital materials.\r\n\r\nWhile my main focus has been on the curation of born-digital materials within hybrid archival collections, this is a foundational element of a comprehensive program to guide the long-term preservation and access to all the digital content that the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library produces and acquires. As Digital Archivist in a medium-sized academic library, I am in an excellent position to lead a collaborative effort to develop and implement a sustainable digital preservation program. Having established policies, procedures, and workflows within the Archives and Special Collections department, in the coming months I will be shifting my data curation activities towards organization-wide tasks. These activities will include the development and implementation of a digital preservation policy framework and technological infrastructure to support ongoing preservation and access services.\r\n\r\nIn my particular organizational context, I am the champion for ensuring that preservation actions are integrated into the workflows of the multiple content streams that are currently part of Library services. This includes helping to revise our digitization workflows and policies to ensure that digital objects are created according to standards and best practices and incorporating the capture and management of metadata needed to ensure current and future access. In addition, I am participating in the development of a Library-managed institutional repository service, a new direction and new content stream for the Library. In a similar manner, my contribution to this project involves ensuring that the preservation and access needs of users are integrated into the design and functions of the hardware and software that underlies this new service.','Meister - Question 1','','inherit','open','open','','4621-revision-5','','','2013-06-15 22:09:44','2013-06-15 22:09:44','',4621,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4621-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(4665,3,'2013-06-15 21:35:52','2013-06-15 21:35:52','Data curation is important to non-data curators because they do not want to have to spend time thinking about data curation. Data creators and users want to focus on creating and using data, engaging in research, and producing knowledge. Data curation is a means to an end for most creators and users, and it functions best if it requires as little effort as possible on their part. While they may not be interested in the details, a data curation service can provide valuable benefits to non-data curators, including:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Ensuring the authenticity and integrity of data</li>\r\n	<li>Assistance with grant funding for data management requirements</li>\r\n	<li>Increased access and distribution of data</li>\r\n	<li>Increased opportunities for new uses</li>\r\n	<li>Increased visibility of research through data citation</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nBeyond the sphere of the individual creator and researcher, data curation has important applications at the organization or institutional level. In a university context, many fundamental business functions rely on the creation of, management of, and access to data assets. The principles of data curation have a direct application at the organizational level, especially in relation to maintaining the authenticity and integrity of the data. As most university business functions are built into enterprise-level systems, data curators have an important role to play in providing guidance on the types of system functionality needed to provide both near-term and potentially long-term access to data assets. The terminology and approach of data curation may not be familiar to non-data curators, potentially necessitating an outreach and education strategy. A good communication strategy to educate and inform non-data curators includes a balance of the benefits of integrating the data curation perspective and the potential risks of not incorporating this approach into enterprise-level system development.','Meister - Question 3','','inherit','open','open','','4625-revision-2','','','2013-06-15 21:35:52','2013-06-15 21:35:52','',4625,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4625-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(4666,3,'2013-06-15 22:16:53','2013-06-15 22:16:53','Data curation is important to non-data curators because they do not want to have to spend time thinking about data curation. Data creators and users want to focus on creating and using data, engaging in research, and producing knowledge. Data curation is a means to an end for most creators and users, and it functions best if it requires as little effort as possible on their part. While they may not be interested in the details, a data curation service can provide valuable benefits to non-data curators, including:\r\n<ul>	<li>Ensuring the authenticity and integrity of data</li>\r\n	<li>Assistance with grant funding for data management requirements</li>\r\n	<li>Increased access and distribution of data</li>\r\n	<li>Increased opportunities for new uses</li>\r\n	<li>Increased visibility of research through data citation</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nBeyond the sphere of the individual creator and researcher, data curation has important applications at the organization or institutional level. In a university context, many fundamental business functions rely on the creation of, management of, and access to data assets. The principles of data curation have a direct application at the organizational level, especially in relation to maintaining the authenticity and integrity of the data. As most university business functions are built into enterprise-level systems, data curators have an important role to play in providing guidance on the types of system functionality needed to provide both near-term and potentially long-term access to data assets. The terminology and approach of data curation may not be familiar to non-data curators, potentially necessitating an outreach and education strategy. A good communication strategy to educate and inform non-data curators includes a balance of the benefits of integrating the data curation perspective and the potential risks of not incorporating this approach into enterprise-level system development.','Meister - Question 3','','inherit','open','open','','4625-revision-3','','','2013-06-15 22:16:53','2013-06-15 22:16:53','',4625,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4625-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(4667,3,'2013-06-15 22:18:08','2013-06-15 22:18:08','Data curation is important to non-data curators because they do not want to have to spend time thinking about data curation. Data creators and users want to focus on creating and using data, engaging in research, and producing knowledge. Data curation is a means to an end for most creators and users, and it functions best if it requires as little effort as possible on their part. While they may not be interested in the details, a data curation service can provide valuable benefits to non-data curators, including:\r\n<ul><li>Ensuring the authenticity and integrity of data</li>\r\n	<li>Assistance with grant funding for data management requirements</li>\r\n	<li>Increased access and distribution of data</li>\r\n	<li>Increased opportunities for new uses</li>\r\n	<li>Increased visibility of research through data citation</li></ul>\r\nBeyond the sphere of the individual creator and researcher, data curation has important applications at the organization or institutional level. In a university context, many fundamental business functions rely on the creation of, management of, and access to data assets. The principles of data curation have a direct application at the organizational level, especially in relation to maintaining the authenticity and integrity of the data. As most university business functions are built into enterprise-level systems, data curators have an important role to play in providing guidance on the types of system functionality needed to provide both near-term and potentially long-term access to data assets. The terminology and approach of data curation may not be familiar to non-data curators, potentially necessitating an outreach and education strategy. A good communication strategy to educate and inform non-data curators includes a balance of the benefits of integrating the data curation perspective and the potential risks of not incorporating this approach into enterprise-level system development.','Meister - Question 3','','inherit','open','open','','4625-revision-4','','','2013-06-15 22:18:08','2013-06-15 22:18:08','',4625,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4625-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(4668,3,'2013-06-15 22:19:08','2013-06-15 22:19:08','Data curation is important to non-data curators because they do not want to have to spend time thinking about data curation. Data creators and users want to focus on creating and using data, engaging in research, and producing knowledge. Data curation is a means to an end for most creators and users, and it functions best if it requires as little effort as possible on their part. While they may not be interested in the details, a data curation service can provide valuable benefits to non-data curators, including:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li>Ensuring the authenticity and integrity of data</li>\r\n	<li>Assistance with grant funding for data management requirements</li>\r\n	<li>Increased access and distribution of data</li>\r\n	<li>Increased opportunities for new uses</li>\r\n	<li>Increased visibility of research through data citation</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nBeyond the sphere of the individual creator and researcher, data curation has important applications at the organization or institutional level. In a university context, many fundamental business functions rely on the creation of, management of, and access to data assets. The principles of data curation have a direct application at the organizational level, especially in relation to maintaining the authenticity and integrity of the data. As most university business functions are built into enterprise-level systems, data curators have an important role to play in providing guidance on the types of system functionality needed to provide both near-term and potentially long-term access to data assets. The terminology and approach of data curation may not be familiar to non-data curators, potentially necessitating an outreach and education strategy. A good communication strategy to educate and inform non-data curators includes a balance of the benefits of integrating the data curation perspective and the potential risks of not incorporating this approach into enterprise-level system development.','Meister - Question 3','','inherit','open','open','','4625-revision-5','','','2013-06-15 22:19:08','2013-06-15 22:19:08','',4625,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4625-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(4669,3,'2013-06-15 21:36:47','2013-06-15 21:36:47','To date, some of my most enlightening moments have been working with and learning from data creators, a process that I hope to expand in the future. A recent series of interactions with a creator who donated a collection of architectural drawings illustrates the types of valuable information that may be exchanged during such meetings. In this case, the Library had already acquired a set of paper drawings, and we were considering the acquisition of a set of AutoCAD drawing files from the same donor. Compared to the range of file formats within our existing collections, AutoCAD files represented a significantly new endeavor in relation to the inherent complexity of these digital objects and preservation concerns due to the proprietary nature of the file format itself.\r\n\r\nI met with the donor to collect additional information to assist in determining the feasibility of acquiring these materials. Conducting an in-person meeting with the donor provided an opportunity to field test our local donor survey instrument to obtain valuable contextual details about the materials, including the creation process, file management procedures, rights and intellectual property concerns, and access requirements. More a dialogue than an interview, the donor meeting also included discussion of, and valuable insight into, the potential access needs of future users of the materials. As an architect who both created and used AutoCAD files on a regular basis, the donor articulated the specific elements of the drawing files that would likely be important for future users, whether undergraduate students or architects seeking to understand the technical details of a building as part of a renovation project. Capturing the donor’s perspective on contextual details and access needs has proved to be highly valuable, informing both the feasibility assessment and preservation strategy for these specific materials. Through our collaboration with the donor, we have developed an initial preservation strategy of migrating the files to PDF/E, an emerging international standard. This strategy will mitigate the issue of the proprietary nature of the native AutoCAD format by converting these files to an open preservation format. Alongside this migration strategy we will also explore the feasibility of an emulation preservation strategy to provide access to the native AutoCAD files.\r\n\r\nThis example of a creator and archivist interaction demonstrates the value that both perspectives bring to the data curation process. Creators have a unique understanding of the research and creation process that results in new data, the type of descriptive information needed to understand that data, and the potential access needs related to and uses of that data. Archivists appreciate and understand the importance of capturing contextual information to ensure that data is made accessible in a form that is meaningful and understandable to both current and future users. The umbrella of data curation provides an excellent opportunity to re-frame and redefine the traditional roles of creator and archivist. Increased involvement and interactions between these entities closer to the point of creation have the potential to inform the design of tools and systems to ensure that valuable contextual information is captured throughout the data lifecycle.','Meister - Question 4','','inherit','open','open','','4627-revision-2','','','2013-06-15 21:36:47','2013-06-15 21:36:47','',4627,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4627-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(4670,3,'2013-06-15 21:37:45','2013-06-15 21:37:45','From my perspective, these issues of technology, infrastructure, staffing, and training are all important issues that can directly impact data curation both within local institutional settings and more generally as a field, but I would argue that a larger cultural issue surrounds and affects all of these elements.\r\n\r\nThe skills and knowledge that data curation professionals need draw from and cut across multiple fields and disciplines. The holistic approach of data curation and its application in multiple industries and sectors challenges traditional boundaries that differentiate cultural heritage professionals. These are, in part, based on the identity of libraries, archives, and museums as institutions defined by the types of materials collected, as well as how those materials are accessed and used. Data curation as a profession represents recognition of the needs of twenty-first-century creators and users and articulates a shift away from traditional boundaries and professional identities. Many groups and individuals have encouraged this shift, but as with any kind of change, there is still hesitation to fully embrace data curation within and across cultural heritage professions.\r\n\r\nIn the United States context, the professional identity of the archivist is connected to a strong set of principles, theories, and practice. Many of the methods and concepts that make up core archival principles reflect the key skills and knowledge that data curation professionals need. Despite these similarities, the traditional notion that the archivist steps in once materials are transferred from the donor to the archives is still the norm. Even in our current moment of digital information ubiquity, this traditional understanding of the role and responsibilities of the archivist is pervasive both within and outside the profession. Data curation encompasses a broader view of the information continuum and illustrates the value of information professionals engaging with creators and users throughout this process. Data curation offers an opportunity to re-envision the role of the archivist as shifting towards a more active engagement as service provider, system designer, and/or data management consultant. To encourage this shift, the cultural heritage community needs to continue to support the development of new data curation skills and knowledge through training and professional development opportunities. In addition, we need to continue to articulate our value and relevance to our local institutions and society as a whole by moving beyond traditional boundaries and professional identities. Data curation, as a conceptual approach and new discipline, provides a framework to make increasingly blurry traditional boundaries even more permeable, a transformation that cultural heritage professionals should wholeheartedly embrace.','Meister - Question 5','','inherit','open','open','','4629-revision-2','','','2013-06-15 21:37:45','2013-06-15 21:37:45','',4629,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4629-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(4671,3,'2013-06-15 21:59:52','2013-06-15 21:59:52','Three factors shape my perspective on data curation: my research interest in the changes in knowledge production over time and across domains; the goals of my CLIR/DLF postdoctoral fellowship; and the mission and activities of the research center where I work, the <a href=\"http://d2i.indiana.edu\">Data to Insight Center</a> (D2I) at Indiana University Bloomington.\r\n\r\nAs a data curation fellow at D2I, I help develop tools and best practices for data management, sharing, and preservation; I conduct research in the areas of data analytics and stewardship as well as digital humanities and digital libraries; and I advance data curation as both an important component of science and as a professional activity.\r\n\r\nMy primary involvement is with the <a href=\"http://sead-data.net\">Sustainable Environment, Actionable Data</a> (SEAD) project. The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded SEAD to create national and global data research infrastructure via the program “Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners (DataNet).” SEAD is a collaboration between the University of Michigan, Indiana University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that works to develop a digital environment that will support data curation and management workflows in sustainability science. D2I is developing Virtual Archive, a solution that provides federated deposit and access capabilities across multiple institutional repositories. A researcher or data curator can use Virtual Archive to automatically deposit data in one of the partner repositories or to search across those repositories and find the data that they need.\r\n\r\nFor SEAD Virtual Archive, I co-lead architectural, policy, and user-engagement activities and solutions. For example, I use my metadata and information organization expertise to improve the Virtual Archive data model and interface to support the dual needs of researchers and data curators. Currently, we are working on identifying layers of semantic information, such as the relationships between different data types within a dataset or the possible uses of data, which can help to describe heterogeneous or multi-variable datasets in sustainability science. I also use my expertise in social theory and the sociology of knowledge to identify barriers in data sharing and find suitable approaches to data sharing and preservation in relevant SEAD disciplines, such as ecology or hydrology.\r\n\r\nI am also involved in the <a href=\"http://d2i.indiana.edu/hathitrust-research-center\">HathiTrust Research Center</a> (HTRC) project. This project develops cyberinfrastructure to support the digital humanities in their work with massive amounts of texts derived from the HathiTrust Digital Library. My role in this project is primarily concerned with engagement and community development. If we want this project to succeed, it is crucial to let the community know about this environment and its capabilities, gather feedback so that we can continue improving it, and perhaps learn together about innovative research opportunities in text computations.\r\n\r\nEngagement and outreach are crucial for my data curation work. Many efforts to facilitate data sharing and preservation exist, yet it is still a relatively new component of scholarship and research. I work to help articulate the value of sharing and preserving data to research communities and to create opportunities to do so. We often talk about how important it is to ground our data tools in actual use cases, so I spend a significant amount of time thinking about how to connect to researchers and their data practices, how to find “data champions,” and how to create a framework to engage researchers in data exchanges. The latter is the focus of my efforts as an active member of the new global initiative called Research Data Alliance (RDA) (http://rd-alliance.org), within which I, along with others, formed an engagement interest group. We had a successful planning meeting during the RDA plenary in March, and about 26 data practitioners and scientists attended. We shared many interesting ideas, such as creating a library of best practices and solutions. Our group is still in the early stages of development and we invite all who are interested to join ((RDA-Engage forum thread can found <a href=\"http://forum.rd-alliance.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&amp;t=26\">here</a>; to subscribe to the RDA-Engage mailing list visit <a href=\"http://lists.lists.rd-alliance.org/mailman/listinfo/rda-cwg-engage\">here</a>)).\r\n<div><br clear=\"all\" />\r\n</div>','Kouper - Question 1','','inherit','open','open','','4601-revision-4','','','2013-06-15 21:59:52','2013-06-15 21:59:52','',4601,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4601-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(4672,3,'2013-06-15 22:25:40','2013-06-15 22:25:40','From a data curation perspective, the distinctions between the sciences, social sciences, and humanities are getting more and more blurred. Many of our projects at D2I aim to facilitate cross-disciplinarily and problem-based research. If someone is working on solving problems of food insecurity or flood management, they would benefit from using heterogeneous data gathered from satellites, sensors, interviews, surveys, and published documents. They could also benefit from a digital environment where they can combine methods, such as statistical analysis, data mining, and visualizations.\n\nObviously, data curation can be domain specific; for example, descriptions of geosciences data would be different from descriptions of sociological surveys. At the same time, it seems more useful to talk about the pressures on and need for curating various types of data, such as images; spatial, temporal, and textual data; audio and video; databases; heterogeneous datasets; and so on. Identifying differences and similarities in the curation of various types of data would allow us to create more integrated environments for sharing and analyzing data across disciplines, fields, and institutions.\n\nIn addition to data types, pressures and needs relating to data curation cluster around the size of datasets, data sensitivity, and researchers’ awareness of the need for data stewardship.\n\n<b>Size of data.</b> There are many discussions around so-called big data versus small or long-tail data. In the business world, big data are often defined along the dimensions of three Vs: volume, velocity, and variety ((Doug Laney, “3D Data Management: Controlling Volume, Velocity and Variety,” <i>Gartner Blog Network</i>, February 6, 2001, <a href=\"Doug Laney, “3D Data Management: Controlling Volume, Velocity and Variety,” Gartner Blog Network, February 6, 2001, http://blogs.gartner.com/doug-laney/files/2012/01/ad949-3D-Data-Management-Controlling-Data-Volume-Velocity-and-Variety.pdf.\">http://blogs.gartner.com/doug-laney/files/2012/01/ad949-3D-Data-Management-Controlling-Data-Volume-Velocity-and-Variety.pdf</a>.)). Big data are the data that are so large, quickly accumulating, and complex that they require different approaches in storage, analysis, and curation, whether dealing with a massive amount of texts in a digital humanities database or high-resolution images in astronomy. Long-tail data have their own challenges. They may be easy to store on one computer, but because they are often collected for individual studies, they may be very heterogeneous in variables and observation points they cover. In data curation, it is hard to figure out how to integrate such data into a single environment. As Katherine Akers pointed out in her recent essay, small data are messy, but they are important; once they are meaningfully preserved and integrated, they can contribute as much if not more to our knowledge as big data ((Katherine Akers, “Looking Out for the Little Guy: Small Data Curation,” <i>Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i>, February/March 2013, <a href=\"http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Feb-13/FebMar13_RDAP_Akers.html\">http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Feb-13/FebMar13_RDAP_Akers.html</a>.)).\n\n<b>Data sensitivity.</b> This is related to the idea of open access to the products of scholarly activities. Proponents argue that open access is beneficial for the advancement of knowledge as well as for the existence of an informed and educated citizenry. Should the ideals and policies of open access be applied to data? Access to data might be more complicated than access to published materials, because knowledge about human subjects or certain areas of the planet can be harmful when widely shared. When thinking about data curation, it is important to develop a framework to address multiple levels of data sensitivity and promote research and education without causing more problems than solutions.\n\n<b>Researchers’ awareness.</b> Research communities vary by their awareness and acceptance of the need to share and curate data. For example, in some disciplines such as climatology or astronomy, the frameworks for data exchanges are much more developed. Climate models rely on the three-dimensional grid that represents and calculates atmospheric, oceanic, and chemical information from around the world. ((NOAA\'s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, “Modeling Climate,” last modified March 7, 2011, <a href=\"http://www.research.noaa.gov/climate/t_modeling.html\">http://www.research.noaa.gov/climate/t_modeling.html</a>.)) No one—be it a person, a team, or an institution—can collect such data on his or her own. That is why climate-modeling efforts are coordinated on the local, national, and international levels and climate data are stored and documented quite well.\n\nIn other disciplines, data efforts are still much more localized. At D2I, we have been working with social-ecological data, particularly in one database that contains information from around the world and spans almost two decades. It is a single database and researchers add information using a standardized instrument. Nevertheless, the variation within this database is immense because researchers collect data for their individual projects and adapt the instrument accordingly. When other researchers consult this database to retrieve data for their individual projects, they do not know what is available to them based on their requirements. And we as data curators and tool developers do not necessarily know how to facilitate their queries and make the database better to navigate and share. Hopefully, as more and more researchers become aware of the importance of sharing their data, we will be able to engage them and create integrated solutions for various communities.','Kouper - Question 2','','inherit','open','open','','4603-autosave','','','2013-06-15 22:25:40','2013-06-15 22:25:40','',4603,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4603-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(4673,3,'2013-06-15 21:59:45','2013-06-15 21:59:45','From a data curation perspective, the distinctions between the sciences, social sciences, and humanities are getting more and more blurred. Many of our projects at D2I aim to facilitate cross-disciplinarily and problem-based research. If someone is working on solving problems of food insecurity or flood management, they would benefit from using heterogeneous data gathered from satellites, sensors, interviews, surveys, and published documents. They could also benefit from a digital environment where they can combine methods, such as statistical analysis, data mining, and visualizations.\r\n\r\nObviously, data curation can be domain specific; for example, descriptions of geosciences data would be different from descriptions of sociological surveys. At the same time, it seems more useful to talk about the pressures on and need for curating various types of data, such as images; spatial, temporal, and textual data; audio and video; databases; heterogeneous datasets; and so on. Identifying differences and similarities in the curation of various types of data would allow us to create more integrated environments for sharing and analyzing data across disciplines, fields, and institutions.\r\n\r\nIn addition to data types, pressures and needs relating to data curation cluster around the size of datasets, data sensitivity, and researchers’ awareness of the need for data stewardship.\r\n\r\n<b>Size of data.</b> There are many discussions around so-called big data versus small or long-tail data. In the business world, big data are often defined along the dimensions of three Vs: volume, velocity, and variety ((Doug Laney, “3D Data Management: Controlling Volume, Velocity and Variety,” <i>Gartner Blog Network</i>, February 6, 2001, <a href=\"Doug Laney, “3D Data Management: Controlling Volume, Velocity and Variety,” Gartner Blog Network, February 6, 2001, http://blogs.gartner.com/doug-laney/files/2012/01/ad949-3D-Data-Management-Controlling-Data-Volume-Velocity-and-Variety.pdf.\">http://blogs.gartner.com/doug-laney/files/2012/01/ad949-3D-Data-Management-Controlling-Data-Volume-Velocity-and-Variety.pdf</a>.)). Big data are the data that are so large, quickly accumulating, and complex that they require different approaches in storage, analysis, and curation, whether dealing with a massive amount of texts in a digital humanities database or high-resolution images in astronomy. Long-tail data have their own challenges. They may be easy to store on one computer, but because they are often collected for individual studies, they may be very heterogeneous in variables and observation points they cover. In data curation, it is hard to figure out how to integrate such data into a single environment. As Katherine Akers pointed out in her recent essay, small data are messy, but they are important; once they are meaningfully preserved and integrated, they can contribute as much if not more to our knowledge as big data ((Katherine Akers, “Looking Out for the Little Guy: Small Data Curation,” <i>Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i>, February/March 2013, <a href=\"http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Feb-13/FebMar13_RDAP_Akers.html\">http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Feb-13/FebMar13_RDAP_Akers.html</a>.)).\r\n\r\n<b>Data sensitivity.</b> This is related to the idea of open access to the products of scholarly activities. Proponents argue that open access is beneficial for the advancement of knowledge as well as for the existence of an informed and educated citizenry. Should the ideals and policies of open access be applied to data? Access to data might be more complicated than access to published materials, because knowledge about human subjects or certain areas of the planet can be harmful when widely shared. When thinking about data curation, it is important to develop a framework to address multiple levels of data sensitivity and promote research and education without causing more problems than solutions.\r\n\r\n<b>Researchers’ awareness.</b> Research communities vary by their awareness and acceptance of the need to share and curate data. For example, in some disciplines such as climatology or astronomy, the frameworks for data exchanges are much more developed. Climate models rely on the three-dimensional grid that represents and calculates atmospheric, oceanic, and chemical information from around the world ((NOAA\'s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, “Modeling Climate,” last modified March 7, 2011, <a href=\"http://www.research.noaa.gov/climate/t_modeling.html\">http://www.research.noaa.gov/climate/t_modeling.html</a>.)). No one—be it a person, a team, or an institution—can collect such data on his or her own. That is why climate-modeling efforts are coordinated on the local, national, and international levels and climate data are stored and documented quite well.\r\n\r\nIn other disciplines, data efforts are still much more localized. At D2I, we have been working with social-ecological data, particularly in one database that contains information from around the world and spans almost two decades. It is a single database and researchers add information using a standardized instrument. Nevertheless, the variation within this database is immense because researchers collect data for their individual projects and adapt the instrument accordingly. When other researchers consult this database to retrieve data for their individual projects, they do not know what is available to them based on their requirements. And we as data curators and tool developers do not necessarily know how to facilitate their queries and make the database better to navigate and share. Hopefully, as more and more researchers become aware of the importance of sharing their data, we will be able to engage them and create integrated solutions for various communities.','Kouper - Question 2','','inherit','open','open','','4603-revision-4','','','2013-06-15 21:59:45','2013-06-15 21:59:45','',4603,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4603-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(4674,3,'2013-06-15 21:59:39','2013-06-15 21:59:39','This question can apply to two groups: those who are involved in data collection, analysis, or storage, but who do not see curation as one of their primary activities (researchers, students, or librarians); or those who benefit from data availability, but who use it primarily to make decisions in their non-data-oriented work (administrators, policy makers, or the larger public).\r\n\r\nThe former group works with data at the earlier stages of the data life cycle. Curation is important for them because of the changes in the system and the relative value of epistemic products. We curate, or take care of, epistemic products and objects, such as publications or material samples, because they are valuable to the research community over time. Data are a crucial component of reproducible and trustworthy research, and when they are reused in other research they minimize the cost of data collection. Therefore, it is important to curate data at the earlier stages of the research life cycle if we want rigor and accountability in research. In this sense, data curation is just another component of the collective enterprise called science that builds upon prior work and constructs knowledge by testing, proving, and falsifying hypotheses and theories.\r\n\r\nHaving said that, I think that we still have a long way to go to recognize the collective value of research data. In many areas of inquiry, data are still rather private, intended for internal use not public communication. Patterns of private use are usually different from those of public use. We may pile up books and magazines in our bedroom, but we would probably put some thought into arranging them in the living room and probably make sure they fit with the overall décor. If we keep thinking about data as something for private use and try to curate them afterwards, we will always end up with “piles” that require a lot of effort to organize and incorporate into the overall ecology of research products. Such data will always be difficult to discover and use. That is why we need to find ways to make data open for public use and discussion; mandates from funding agencies are not sufficient in this regard.\r\n\r\nFor the latter group of decision makers and the public, the argument for data curation is similar to the argument about the importance of science: Having well-preserved data that are easy to discover and work with helps us join efforts and better explain and understand the world, which ultimately improves our lives and our future.','Kouper - Question 3','','inherit','open','open','','4605-revision-4','','','2013-06-15 21:59:39','2013-06-15 21:59:39','',4605,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4605-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(4675,3,'2013-06-15 22:28:36','2013-06-15 22:28:36','I find all aspects of my work enlightening: working in large and small collaborations, interacting with diverse groups of people, building tools to address the needs of different communities, engaging with researchers, and trying to understand the similarities and differences in data practices across epistemic cultures.\n\nI value the diversity of opportunities that my work gives me. At the same time, it is hard to act on different opportunities and go outside of academic circles. So far I have been working mostly with researchers, other data curators, and managers at research institutions. I am looking forward to engaging more with the second group of data users that I mentioned above—those who benefit from data availability but do not necessarily collect or disseminate data. I am interested in such projects as citizen science or participatory data stewardship, but I recently realized that such projects may take more planning, time, energy, and so on.\n\nI had only a few preliminary encounters with non-academic data users, but as I try to get more information about possible ways of engagement, it is very interesting to see how channels and modes of communication as well as perspectives on data may differ. For example, I recently had a conversation with an executive director of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) about the importance of sharing earth science data with users such as police offices, disaster management forces, and so on. She had a great idea of organizing an event within the ESIP annual meeting, where such users would come and work together on a shared set of data, using scenarios or something else. Possible outcomes could be a framework, a set of requirements, or even infrastructure modules that would help to use earth science data in non-research contexts. As we discussed this possible project, I realized that most of the existing recommendations of how to engage users in data stewardship are for working with researchers and addressing their needs. We need to address the needs of other user groups so that they become agents in data stewardship as well. One interesting example of that sort of project is a recent data management guide for citizen scientists. ((DataONE Public Participation in Scientific Research Working Group, “Data Management Guide for Citizen Scientists,” February, 2013, <a href=\"http://www.dataone.org/sites/all/documents/DataONE-PPSR-DataManagementGuide.pdf\">http://www.dataone.org/sites/all/documents/DataONE-PPSR-DataManagementGuide.pdf</a>.))','Kouper - Question 4','','inherit','open','open','','4607-autosave','','','2013-06-15 22:28:36','2013-06-15 22:28:36','',4607,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4607-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(4676,3,'2013-06-15 21:59:35','2013-06-15 21:59:35','I find all aspects of my work enlightening: working in large and small collaborations, interacting with diverse groups of people, building tools to address the needs of different communities, engaging with researchers, and trying to understand the similarities and differences in data practices across epistemic cultures.\r\n\r\nI value the diversity of opportunities that my work gives me. At the same time, it is hard to act on different opportunities and go outside of academic circles. So far I have been working mostly with researchers, other data curators, and managers at research institutions. I am looking forward to engaging more with the second group of data users that I mentioned above—those who benefit from data availability but do not necessarily collect or disseminate data. I am interested in such projects as citizen science or participatory data stewardship, but I recently realized that such projects may take more planning, time, energy, and so on.\r\n\r\nI had only a few preliminary encounters with non-academic data users, but as I try to get more information about possible ways of engagement, it is very interesting to see how channels and modes of communication as well as perspectives on data may differ. For example, I recently had a conversation with an executive director of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners ESIP (http://www.esipfed.org/) about the importance of sharing earth science data with users such as police offices, disaster management forces, and so on. She had a great idea of organizing an event within the ESIP annual meeting, where such users would come and work together on a shared set of data, using scenarios or something else. Possible outcomes could be a framework, a set of requirements, or even infrastructure modules that would help to use earth science data in non-research contexts. As we discussed this possible project, I realized that most of the existing recommendations of how to engage users in data stewardship are for working with researchers and addressing their needs. We need to address the needs of other user groups so that they become agents in data stewardship as well. One interesting example of that sort of project is a recent data management guide for citizen scientists ((DataONE Public Participation in Scientific Research Working Group, “Data Management Guide for Citizen Scientists,” February, 2013, <a href=\"http://www.dataone.org/sites/all/documents/DataONE-PPSR-DataManagementGuide.pdf\">http://www.dataone.org/sites/all/documents/DataONE-PPSR-DataManagementGuide.pdf</a>.)).','Kouper - Question 4','','inherit','open','open','','4607-revision-4','','','2013-06-15 21:59:35','2013-06-15 21:59:35','',4607,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4607-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(4677,3,'2013-06-15 22:30:20','2013-06-15 22:30:20','I think the biggest issue is us, people. We are capable of building sophisticated tools and infrastructures, but because data curation is a collective enterprise and a long-term dynamic system, we constantly need to negotiate our goals, needs, values, and attitudes. There are many social, political, and historical reasons for data curation to fail or succeed. We need to be aware of that.\n\nMy view on the biggest issue facing data curation is aligned with insights from the history and sociology of science. Many publications have expressed this view, but Edwards, Jackson, Bowker, and Knobel’s report on challenges regarding infrastructures is probably most relevant to the issue of data stewardship. ((Paul N. Edwards, Steven J Jackson, Geoffrey C Bowker, and Cory P Knobel, “Report of a Workshop on ‘History &amp; Theory of Infrastructure : Lessons for New Scientific Cyberinfrastructures’ January 2007,” <i>Design</i> 20 (January 2007): 1-50, <a href=\"http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/49353\">http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/49353</a>.)) It is also more useful and interesting to consider not just data, but a broader range of products, or what Bechhover et al. call “research objects,” such as publications, data, code and algorithms, workflows, and so on. ((Sean Bechhofer, David De Roure, Matthew Gamble, Carole Goble, and Iain Buchan, “Research Objects: Towards Exchange and Reuse of Digital Knowledge,” <i>Nature Proceedings</i> (2010), <a href=\"http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268555/\">http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268555/</a>.))\n\nAs a complex system, research-object curation involves tensions, such as those between immediate and long-term goals of development, between global and local implementations, and between planned versus emergent changes in the system. To negotiate these, the system needs actors in different roles, including technical experts, managers, and “champions” who stimulate interest and promote adoption. During systemic growth, users and user communities can become critical to success or failure.\n\nData curation is embedded in social and institutional practices and norms, none of which change more slowly than communication and data-processing technologies. These discontinuities may be part of the reason why culture of sharing and making data public has not been widely adopted, and they may also become obstacles in creating such a culture in the future. As people, practices, and norms play a formative role in data curation, it is important to remember that there are always “winners” and “losers.” Some people initiate and adopt innovation and change, while others resist it and find it hard to fit in. To quote Edwards et al., “It is also possible that a tech-centered approach to the challenge of data sharing inclines us toward failure from the beginning, because it leaves untouched underlying questions of incentives, organization, and culture that have in fact <i>always </i>structured the nature and viability of distributed scientific work.\" ((Edwards et al, “Report of a Workshop,” 32.))\n\nPaths to solutions that Edwards et al. hint at include historical and sociological awareness; the consolidation of local systems and tools; the development of bridges and gateways, as well as boundary workers who can act as “bridge-builders” and “translators”; and more flexibility and collaboration. The question that data curators need to ask themselves is, “Are we playing a role in any of these?”','Kouper - Question 5','','inherit','open','open','','4609-autosave','','','2013-06-15 22:30:20','2013-06-15 22:30:20','',4609,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4609-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(4678,3,'2013-06-15 21:59:28','2013-06-15 21:59:28','I think the biggest issue is us, people. We are capable of building sophisticated tools and infrastructures, but because data curation is a collective enterprise and a long-term dynamic system, we constantly need to negotiate our goals, needs, values, and attitudes. There are many social, political, and historical reasons for data curation to fail or succeed. We need to be aware of that.\r\n\r\nMy view on the biggest issue facing data curation is aligned with insights from the history and sociology of science. Many publications have expressed this view, but Edwards, Jackson, Bowker, and Knobel’s report on challenges regarding infrastructures is probably most relevant to the issue of data stewardship ((Paul N. Edwards, Steven J Jackson, Geoffrey C Bowker, and Cory P Knobel, “Report of a Workshop on ‘History &amp; Theory of Infrastructure : Lessons for New Scientific Cyberinfrastructures’ January 2007,” <i>Design</i> 20 (January 2007): 1-50, <a href=\"http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/49353\">http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/49353</a>.)). It is also more useful and interesting to consider not just data, but a broader range of products, or what Bechhover et al. call “research objects,” such as publications, data, code and algorithms, workflows, and so on ((Sean Bechhofer, David De Roure, Matthew Gamble, Carole Goble, and Iain Buchan, “Research Objects: Towards Exchange and Reuse of Digital Knowledge,” <i>Nature Proceedings</i> (2010), <a href=\"http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268555/\">http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268555/</a>.)).\r\n\r\nAs a complex system, research-object curation involves tensions, such as those between immediate and long-term goals of development, between global and local implementations, and between planned versus emergent changes in the system. To negotiate these, the system needs actors in different roles, including technical experts, managers, and “champions” who stimulate interest and promote adoption. During systemic growth, users and user communities can become critical to success or failure.\r\n\r\nData curation is embedded in social and institutional practices and norms, none of which change more slowly than communication and data-processing technologies. These discontinuities may be part of the reason why culture of sharing and making data public has not been widely adopted, and they may also become obstacles in creating such a culture in the future. As people, practices, and norms play a formative role in data curation, it is important to remember that there are always “winners” and “losers.” Some people initiate and adopt innovation and change, while others resist it and find it hard to fit in. To quote Edwards et al., “It is also possible that a tech-centered approach to the challenge of data sharing inclines us toward failure from the beginning, because it leaves untouched underlying questions of incentives, organization, and culture that have in fact <i>always </i>structured the nature and viability of distributed scientific work\" ((Edwards et al, “Report of a Workshop,” 32.)).\r\n\r\nPaths to solutions that Edwards et al. hint at include historical and sociological awareness; the consolidation of local systems and tools; the development of bridges and gateways, as well as boundary workers who can act as “bridge-builders” and “translators”; and more flexibility and collaboration. The question that data curators need to ask themselves is, “Are we playing a role in any of these?”','Kouper - Question 5','','inherit','open','open','','4609-revision-3','','','2013-06-15 21:59:28','2013-06-15 21:59:28','',4609,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4609-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(4679,3,'2013-06-15 21:42:03','2013-06-15 21:42:03','In my current position, data curation is part of the larger design problem of how to use digital tools and methodologies to accomplish innovative humanities research. I am a librarian trained in digital humanities and data curation now working in both an academic research library (University of Maryland Libraries) and in a leadership position at a successful digital humanities center (the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities). My job involves data curation as part of strategic planning, project development, teaching and training, and, most generally, producing public research that others can build upon, continue, and enrich ((Mark Sample, “When Does Service Become Scholarship?” <i>SAMPLE REALITY</i>, February 8, 2013, <a href=\"http://www.samplereality.com/2013/02/08/when-does-service-become-scholarship/\">http://www.samplereality.com/2013/02/08/when-does-service-become-scholarship/</a>.)). As I have written elsewhere (with Allen Renear), data curation refers to “the challenge of maintaining digital information that is produced in the course of research in a manner that preserves its meaning and usefulness as a potential input for further research.” ((Trevor Muñoz and Allen Renear, “Issues in Humanities Data Curation,” June 15, 2011, <a href=\"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/30852\">https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/30852</a>.)) This can involve everything from just making the responsibilities for data management explicit in the form of a plan to more intensive work like creating documentation or normalizing “messy” data. In working on the kinds of diverse teams that get assembled to do digital humanities work, I try to be the one who is extra mindful of what is happening to the project data, just as I expect the software developers to be most aware of our technical architecture and the disciplinary specialist to be most aware of what intervention our project is trying to make in scholarly debates.\r\n\r\nI am convinced that as the materials and analytical practices of humanities research become increasingly digital, the theoretical knowledge and practical skills of information science, librarianship, and archival science—which come together in the research and practice of data curation—will become more vital to more humanists. At the level of strategic planning, data curation work is mostly awareness building; this involves introducing data curation into discussions as diverse as how we build all our websites, to how we imagine and staff new positions. At the level of project development, data curation takes a more concrete shape in the work we do. Much of the research I work on is generously supported by funders such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Like funders of scientific research, the Office of Digital Humanities at the NEH requires that proposals for funding include data management plans. Some of my work involves writing these plans and developing practices for monitoring and following up on their content.\r\n\r\nFinally, data curation needs to become part of our shared understanding of what it means to do humanities research, especially with digital materials. This will mean adapting not only our methods and methods courses but also our standards for professional work, benchmarks for success, and the extra-professional socialization into a field that helps new researchers absorb these standards. Part of bringing these changes about involves teaching and training about the importance of data curation and how to do it. I try to contribute to this by finding opportunities to teach data curation to other librarians and humanists. At the first Digital Humanities Winter Institute, which I co-directed with Jennifer Guiliano, we introduced a course on “Data Curation for Digital Humanists” (which Dorothea Salo and I teach). Thanks again to the support of the NEH, Julia Flanders, Dorothea, and I will be offering similar short courses as part of a series of humanities data-curation workshops funded by a grant from the Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities.','Munoz - Question 1','','inherit','open','open','','4631-revision-2','','','2013-06-15 21:42:03','2013-06-15 21:42:03','',4631,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4631-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(4680,3,'2013-06-15 21:45:11','2013-06-15 21:45:11','In many ways the needs of and pressures on data curation are the same across the social sciences, humanities, and sciences. Moreover, since data curation, like other information sciences, is a “meta-discipline” ((Marcia J. Bates, “The Invisible Substrate of Information Science,” <i>Journal of the American Society for Information Science</i> 50, no. 12 (1999): 1043-50.)) rather than being strictly of the humanities, social sciences, or hard sciences, there are shared concepts and terminology that we can apply to the problems of data curation across disciplines ((See Allen H. Renear, Molly Dolan, Kevin Trainor, and Melissa H. Cragin, “Towards a Cross-Disciplinary Notion of Data Level in Data Curation,” November 11, 2009, <a href=\"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/14547\">https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/14547</a>.)). Certainly, the technical challenges of preserving digital information—unstable media, basic bit-level data integrity, rendering many different file formats over time, architectures, and the economics of data storage—are shared problems. These pressures may be of differing intensity across communities. Many humanists do not (yet) have to contemplate data volumes measured in exabytes as astronomers do. Already, though, humanists are working with volumes of data too large to manipulate and analyze with conventional, widely available tools; this trend in humanities research is only likely to grow as researchers devote increasing attention to the contemporary moment ((“Big Data,” <i>Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia</i>, February 9, 2013, <a href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_data&amp;oldid=537356997\">http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_data&amp;oldid=537356997</a>.)). The basic structure of the scholarly communication economy is another shared challenge for data curation across the disciplines. Data curation must engage with which scholarly outputs are “published,” how credit is apportioned for them (the citation of datasets, for example), and the role of for-profit corporations in the dissemination of research (in relation to open access and open data movements).\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nEven in the areas where there may be the most divergence about the needs of and pressures on data curation—the evidentiary role of information, the place of “interpretation,” and the nature of “proof”—I think there is more commonality than difference. As the amount of information grows and as the work of research in many disciplines increasingly involves managing and analyzing larger and larger amounts of information, human judgment is paired increasingly with (automated) machine analysis. (Part of data curation is working better with “robots.”) More rigorous conceptual and semantic modeling is needed to incorporate automated algorithmic processes into research—from the search engines everyone uses to the sophisticated data-filtering techniques necessary for working with streams of data coming from large telescopes ((I am indebted to Sayeed Choudhury for the telescope example; any failing in the paraphrasing is mine. Personal conversation.)). Because machines increasingly and inevitably mediate our work with data, the challenges of preserving (human) meaning and interpretation in computational environments for data curation are significant, and this is true across the social sciences, humanities, and the sciences ((Compare David Dubin, Karen M. Wickett, and Simone Sacchi, “Content, Format, and Interpretation,” <i>Balisage: The Markup Conference 2011</i>, August 2 - 5, 2011, <a href=\"http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol7/html/Dubin01/BalisageVol7-Dubin01.html\">http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol7/html/Dubin01/BalisageVol7-Dubin01.html</a>, doi:10.4242/BalisageVol7.Dubin01; and Julia Flanders and Trevor Muñoz, “An Introduction to Humanities Data Curation,” <i>DH Curation Guide</i>, September 22, 2011, <a href=\"http://guide.dhcuration.org/intro/\">http://guide.dhcuration.org/intro/</a>.)).','Munoz - Question 2','','inherit','open','open','','4633-revision-2','','','2013-06-15 21:45:11','2013-06-15 21:45:11','',4633,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4633-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(4681,3,'2013-06-15 21:47:23','2013-06-15 21:47:23','Carrying out digital research (almost all research is now at least semi-digital) requires that both scholars and information professionals understand how to manage and curate data over its entire lifetime of interest. At the least, individual scholars must be able to document their data curation strategies and evaluate those of collaborators and other purveyors of data.\r\n\r\nIn important ways, data curation is not new. Drawing on increasingly precise conceptual definitions of “data”—information systematically asserted as evidence ((For extended discussion see Allen H. Renear, Simone Sacchi, and Karen M. Wickett, “Definitions of Dataset in the Scientific and Technical Literature,” <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 47, no. 1 (2010): 1-4, doi:10.1002/meet.14504701240; and Dubin, et al., “Content, Format, and Interpretation.”)). I would hope to convince those who are not primarily data curators that data curation is important to them because the theories and practices of data curation are crucial to communicating the enduring meaning and intent of any scholarship or research in ways that are authentic, contextualized, and complete. The first beneficiaries of data curation work are researchers themselves. Jason Scott from the Internet Archive has said that metadata is a “love note” to the future ((Jason Scott, “The Metadata Mania,” <i>ASCII</i>, June 26, 2011, <a href=\"http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3181\">http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3181</a>.)). In terms of keeping research information comprehensible and usable, even to the person who created it, the future doesn’t need to be far distant, as anyone who has tried to decipher, some months later, a partial reference citation in his notes or tried to remember all the variables of her topic modeling experiment can attest. The strategies for data curation may be as simple as file-naming conventions, data replication, and very basic description. Or, the strategies may be as complicated as managing the integrity and renderability of large, complex 3D representations of information that cannot be recovered after its moment of collection, during the stages of an archaeological excavation, for example.\r\n\r\nMark Sample defines scholarship as “a creative or intellectual act [that is] public and circulates in a community of peers that evaluates and builds upon it.” ((Sample, “When Does Service Become Scholarship?”)) From this definition, it follows that scholarship depends on good data curation practice, which enables the dissemination and circulation of research products in ways that other scholars can build upon.\r\n\r\nI also hope to convince those who are not primarily data curators of the importance of data curation by appealing to the public trust. Much of the research happening in the United States is funded by the public. The resulting data does not belong only to the researcher who creates it, but is held by that person as a public trust. Data curation is part of the ethical responsibility of good research, and that should concern everyone.','Munoz - Question 3','','inherit','open','open','','4636-revision-2','','','2013-06-15 21:47:23','2013-06-15 21:47:23','',4636,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4636-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(4682,3,'2013-06-15 22:39:27','2013-06-15 22:39:27','Preparing the lectures for an introductory training course on data curation for humanists led to my most enlightening moment so far. In trying to explain the role of social factors in supporting preservation and the re-use of data, I started to see more points of convergence between data curation and work on “crowdsourcing” and closely related ideas of public humanities. This convergence is an effect of the changed information environment for “scholarly” data. Specifically, library and information science (LIS) represent a body of theory and practice on connecting users with information. ((Carole L. Palmer, Allen H. Renear, and Melissa H. Cragin, “Purposeful Curation: Research and Education for a Future with Working Data,” December 2, 2008, <a href=\"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/9764\">https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/9764</a>.)) New LIS research on questions of data “value,” which is closely tied to re-use and thus preservation, draws on this older tradition of service to user communities, to develop a thesis that “highly valuable research data are anti-fragile; they are capable of not just persisting over time but actually gaining in value as they are stressed via application to new settings, used in diverse contexts, and transferred amongst a network of systems.” ((Nicholas M. Weber, Karen S. Baker, Andrea K. Thomer, Tiffany C. Chao, and Carole L. Palmer. “Value and Context in Data Use: Domain Analysis Revisited,” <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 49, no. 1 (2012): 1–10. doi:10.1002/meet.14504901168.)) Attention is a crucial factor in the survival of any particular dataset. The current configuration of Internet technologies has lowered the barrier to the loosely coordinated publishing of information to platforms (like Wikipedia), and these now concentrate an immense amount of attention (due in part to the market dominance of Google’s particular search engine technology). Thus, my moment of enlightenment came from realizing that data curators should be asking what public, web-based resources need to be curated alongside “local” data in order to increase the integration of a research project with a larger information network, which is a public good or a “commons.” Curation of one’s own data might well mean working on someone else’s data—for example, by improving the coverage of women’s history in Wikipedia, ((Mia Ridge, “New Challenges in Digital History: Sharing Women’s History on Wikipedia - My Talk Notes,” <i>Open Objects</i>, March 23, 2013, <a href=\"http://openobjects.blogspot.com/2013/03/new-challenges-in-digital-history.html\">http://openobjects.blogspot.com/2013/03/new-challenges-in-digital-history.html</a>.)) which serves as a source, via things like DBpedia, for identifiers to be used in the “linked data cloud.”\n\nThe digital humanities exist at the intersection of computational technologies with the theories, practices, and research questions of the humanities. Digital humanists have been publishing scholarship to “the Web” since its inception (as documented through crucial early projects like <i><a href=\"http://vos.ucsb.edu/\">Voice of the Shuttle</a>)</i>. The persistence of interest on the part of digital humanists to put more of certain kinds of humanities scholarship into “public” spaces is supported by numerous examples. The enthusiasm for both using and providing application programming interfaces (APIs) to digitized collections, and in creating additions to massively popular publishing software such as WordPress for scholarly purposes, demonstrates this. In other words, the digital humanities engage with “the Web” for scholarly communication, advocacy, etc., but this engagement also has important curatorial and preservation consequences. Palmer, Renear, and Cragin envision that data curators “will build and maintain not only digital libraries and curated data sets, but also the associated indexing systems, metadata standards, ontologies, and retrieval systems.” ((Palmer, Renear, and Cragin, “Purposeful Curation: Research and Education for a Future with Working Data.”)) I would argue that these indexing systems and ontologies include open, web-based resources like Wikipedia (or maybe structured data resources derived from Wikipedia.) ((For example, <a href=\"http://www.freebase.com/\">http://www.freebase.com/</a>.)) Wikipedia is the quintessential “crowdsourced” project and its use as a shared data resource suggests that data curation needs will push scholars and librarians further toward participating in a public information sphere on the web as a way to support local datasets.','Munoz - Question 4','','inherit','open','open','','4638-autosave','','','2013-06-15 22:39:27','2013-06-15 22:39:27','',4638,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4638-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(4683,3,'2013-06-15 21:50:19','2013-06-15 21:50:19','Preparing the lectures for an introductory training course on data curation for humanists led to my most enlightening moment so far. In trying to explain the role of social factors in supporting preservation and the re-use of data, I started to see more points of convergence between data curation and work on “crowdsourcing” and closely related ideas of public humanities. This convergence is an effect of the changed information environment for “scholarly” data. Specifically, library and information science (LIS) represent a body of theory and practice on connecting users with information ((Carole L. Palmer, Allen H. Renear, and Melissa H. Cragin, “Purposeful Curation: Research and Education for a Future with Working Data,” December 2, 2008, <a href=\"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/9764\">https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/9764</a>.)). New LIS research on questions of data “value,” which is closely tied to re-use and thus preservation, draws on this older tradition of service to user communities, to develop a thesis that “highly valuable research data are anti-fragile; they are capable of not just persisting over time but actually gaining in value as they are stressed via application to new settings, used in diverse contexts, and transferred amongst a network of systems.” ((Nicholas M. Weber, Karen S. Baker, Andrea K. Thomer, Tiffany C. Chao, and Carole L. Palmer. “Value and Context in Data Use: Domain Analysis Revisited,” <i>Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology</i> 49, no. 1 (2012): 1–10. doi:10.1002/meet.14504901168.)) Attention is a crucial factor in the survival of any particular dataset. The current configuration of Internet technologies has lowered the barrier to the loosely coordinated publishing of information to platforms (like Wikipedia), and these now concentrate an immense amount of attention (due in part to the market dominance of Google’s particular search engine technology). Thus, my moment of enlightenment came from realizing that data curators should be asking what public, web-based resources need to be curated alongside “local” data in order to increase the integration of a research project with a larger information network, which is a public good or a “commons.” Curation of one’s own data might well mean working on someone else’s data—for example, by improving the coverage of women’s history in Wikipedia, ((Mia Ridge, “New Challenges in Digital History: Sharing Women’s History on Wikipedia - My Talk Notes,” <i>Open Objects</i>, March 23, 2013, <a href=\"http://openobjects.blogspot.com/2013/03/new-challenges-in-digital-history.html\">http://openobjects.blogspot.com/2013/03/new-challenges-in-digital-history.html</a>.)) which serves as a source, via things like DBpedia, for identifiers to be used in the “linked data cloud”.\r\n\r\nThe digital humanities exist at the intersection of computational technologies with the theories, practices, and research questions of the humanities. Digital humanists have been publishing scholarship to “the Web” since its inception (as documented through crucial early projects like <i>Voice of the Shuttle </i>[link to: <a href=\"http://vos.ucsb.edu/\">http://vos.ucsb.edu/</a>]). The persistence of interest on the part of digital humanists to put more of certain kinds of humanities scholarship into “public” spaces is supported by numerous examples. The enthusiam for both using and providing application programming interfaces (APIs) to digitized collections, and in creating additions to massively popular publishing software such as WordPress for scholarly purposes, demonstrates this. In other words, the digital humanities engage with “the Web” for scholarly communication, advocacy, etc., but this engagement also has important curatorial and preservation consequences. Palmer, Renear, and Cragin envision that data curators “will build and maintain not only digital libraries and curated data sets, but also the associated indexing systems, metadata standards, ontologies, and retrieval systems.” ((Palmer, Renear, and Cragin, “Purposeful Curation: Research and Education for a Future with Working Data.”)) I would argue that these indexing systems and ontologies include open, web-based resources like Wikipedia (or maybe structured data resources derived from Wikipedia.) ((For example, <a href=\"http://www.freebase.com/\">http://www.freebase.com/</a>.)) Wikipedia is the quintessential “crowdsourced” project and its use as a shared data resource suggests that data curation needs will push scholars and librarians further toward participating in a public information sphere on the web as a way to support local datasets.','Munoz - Question 4','','inherit','open','open','','4638-revision-2','','','2013-06-15 21:50:19','2013-06-15 21:50:19','',4638,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4638-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(4796,10,'2013-06-24 05:23:40','2013-06-24 05:23:40','If you have been in an American public school between 1980 and today, it is highly probable that\r\nyou have played or watched someone playing <a title=\"Oregon Trail Series\" href=\"http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/oregon-trail-series\">The Oregon Trail</a>. ((“Oregon Trail Series,” accessed January 17, 2013, <a title=\"Oregon Trail Series\" href=\"http://www.mobygames.com/gamegroup/oregon-trail-series\">http://www.mobygames.com/gamegroup/oregon-trail-series</a>. Some history of the game is given here: Devin Monnens, “Oregon Trail Ver. 3 (BASIC 3.1, 1978),” Desert Hat, November 7, 2010, <em id=\"__mceDel\"><em id=\"__mceDel\"><a href=\"http://deserthat.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/oregon-trail-ver-3-basic-3-1-1978/\">http://deserthat.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/oregon-trail-ver-3-basic-3-1-1978/</a>.</em></em>)) Originally released by the Minnesota Educational Computer Consortium (MECC) for teletypes in the state\'s public schools, the <a title=\"Oregon Trail Canonization\" href=\"http://vgc.gameology.org/content/oregon-trail-canonization\">game has progressed</a> from being played on a mainframe computer, to magazine type-in game, to mobile devices and <a title=\"Facebook: Oregon Settler\" href=\"https://www.facebook.com/appcenter/oregon_settler\">Facebook</a>. ((“On the Oregon Trail to Canonization,” A Video Game Canon, March 31, 2011, <a title=\"Oregon Trail Canonization\" href=\"http://vgc.gameology.org/content/oregon-trail-canonization\">http://vgc.gameology.org/content/oregon-trail-canonization</a>. “Oregon Trail: American Settler,” App Center, Facebook, accessed January 17, 2013, <a title=\"Facebook: Oregon Settler\" href=\"http://www.facebook.com/appcenter/oregon_settler\">http://www.facebook.com/appcenter/oregon_settler</a>.)) More accurately called a simulation, The Oregon Trail puts the player in the shoes of an American migrant traveling to Oregon City through obstacles of weather, violence, starvation, and disease. The franchise is almost certainly the most successful educational game series, which, combined with its powerful iconic value, almost certainly guaranteed its inclusion in the case set for the second phase of <a title=\"Preserving Virtual Worlds\" href=\"http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/\">Preserving Virtual</a> <a title=\"Preserving Virtual Worlds\" href=\"http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/\"> Worlds</a> (PVW2). ((Preserving Virtual Worlds 2, accessed January 17, 2013, <a title=\"Preserving Virtual Worlds\" href=\"http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/\">http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw2/</a>.))\r\n\r\nWhen PVW2 began, we attempted to identify the significant properties of games in our case set with the hope of creating a generalizable methodology for game preservationists in the future. Examining which features changed or remained the same throughout a franchise\'s history was one way we went about identifying those properties, and The Oregon Trail, with <a title=\"Four Decades on the Oregon Trail\" href=\"http://www.icheg.org/blog/chegheads/2010/02/four-decades-on-the-oregon-trail/\">its four-decade</a> <a title=\"Four Decades on the Oregon Trail\" href=\"http://www.icheg.org/blog/chegheads/2010/02/four-decades-on-the-oregon-trail/\"> history</a>, was the perfect candidate. ((Jon-Paul Dyson, “Four Decades on the Oregon Trail,” CHEGheads, February 8, 2010, <a title=\"Four Decades on the Oregon Trail\" href=\"http://www.icheg.org/blog/chegheads/2010/02/four-decades-on-the-oregon-trail/\">http://www.icheg.org/blog/chegheads/2010/02/four-decades-on-the-oregon-trail/</a>.)) The comic below illustrates some of our adventures, with otters representing the researchers. Why otters? All I will say is there might be an Easter egg in the PVW1 final report.','Of Snakebites, Squirrels, and Snow: Significant Properties of the Oregon Trail','','publish','open','open','','of-snakebites-squirrels-and-snow-significant-properties-of-the-oregon-trail','','\nhttp://deserthat.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/oregon-trail-ver-3-basic-3-1-1978/','2013-07-06 23:23:05','2013-07-06 23:23:05','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=4796',0,'post','',0),(4686,3,'2013-06-15 23:41:21','2013-06-15 23:41:21','','Caro Pinto','','publish','closed','closed','','cap-caro-pinto','','','2013-07-08 16:25:43','2013-07-08 16:25:43','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?post_type=guest-author&#038;p=4686',0,'guest-author','',0),(4687,3,'2013-06-15 23:40:51','2013-06-15 23:40:51','','pinto_webphoto','','inherit','open','open','','pinto_webphoto','','','2013-06-15 23:40:51','2013-06-15 23:40:51','',4686,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/pinto_webphoto.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(4689,3,'2013-06-15 23:51:02','2013-06-15 23:51:02','Librarians have long been critical collaborators with their faculty in higher-education classroom settings, teaching research-education principles and providing one-on-one help with students to locate and evaluate sources for research projects. Until recently, most of these student projects have been research papers of varying lengths; each writing experience is a solo project that leads students to monkish behavior in solitary library carrels and dorm rooms. Today\'s students have new opportunities to apply critical thinking and research skills in transformative digital and collaborative projects. At Harvard, for example, students in an African and African American Studies course recently created digital stories about music, language, and digital media in former Portuguese colonies. ((Carla D. Martin, “Wikipedia, Storify, and Zeega in the Classroom,” <i>Storify</i>, n.d., <a href=\"http://storify.com/carladmartin/storify-the-classroom\">http://storify.com/carladmartin/storify-the-classroom</a>. This provides an overview of the work students undertook at Harvard University in Carla D. Martin’s fall 2012 course, African and African American Studies 114x: From Cesaria Evora to Dama do Bling: Language, Music, and Digital Media in the Former Portuguese Colonies. Martin reported that she met with librarians before the semester to discuss copyright issues and best practices for working with students on multimedia projects. The librarians also put Martin in touch with faculty who undertook similar projects.)) This type of venture requires a different level of support from and collaboration with librarians who work in classroom settings. The digital landscape demands new roles for teaching librarians and archivists as they shepherd and coordinate a range of projects, working with students and faculty from initial visions to implementation questions to final products.\r\n\r\nAs many courses begin to incorporate digital components, faculty must use course time to cover content <i>and</i> deal with the learning curve involved in utilizing new and unfamiliar digital tools. Faculty often do not have the time or capacity, for example, to teach students how to use blogging platforms or digital storytelling platforms. Teaching librarians and archivists are natural collaborators to facilitate digital learning in classrooms. Especially on liberal arts college campuses, it is increasingly common for teaching librarians to count among their responsibilities the teaching of digital tools and use of instructional technology. Librarians can provide one-stop support for faculty and students in classes with digital research and project components. ((Barbara A. Rockenbach, “Archives, Undergraduates, and Inquiry-Based Learning: Case Studies from Yale University Library,” <i>American Archivist</i> 74, no. 1 (2011): 297.)) Teaching librarians and archivists focus on process: how to use software, how to deploy archival sources, how to understand the finer points of copyright, and how to support and preserve projects and their accompanying data for the long term. We can leave the content to faculty; though we may be subject experts, one of our unsung strengths lies in project management, in the shepherding of student research from amorphous ideas to concrete sets of questions. We can collaborate with faculty to implement project guidelines that meet students’ learning goals and that can support digital projects on various platforms, including curated exhibits that engage a range of critical thinking skills.\r\n\r\n<b>Skills for Teaching Librarians &amp; Archivists in the Digital Age</b>\r\n\r\nTeaching librarians and archivists are no longer simply bibliographers or collections experts. Now they are research and technology sherpas, guiding faculty and students towards meaningful learning experiences and successful projects. The digital age requires us to have a new suite of skills that prepares us to support digital scholarship in classrooms or to communicate effectively with teams of technologists and information professionals—instructional technologists, reference archivists, GIS specialists, and visual resources librarians—on a range of projects. Teaching librarians and archivists may also be:\r\n<ul>\r\n	<li><b>Digital Humanists</b> who use the “methods of contemporary humanities in studying digital objects.” ((Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “The Humanities, Done Digitally,” <i>The Chronicle of Higher Education</i>, May 8, 2011, sec. The Digital Campus 2011, <a href=\"http://chronicle.com/article/The-Humanities-Done-Digitally/127382/\">http://chronicle.com/article/The-Humanities-Done-Digitally/127382/</a>.)) Projects like Around DH in 80 days provide an opportunity for seasoned DH practitioners and newbies alike to engage with the Digital Humanities in a global context. ((“Around DH in 80 Days,” <i>Global Outlook::Digital Humanities</i>, February 4, 2013, <a href=\"http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/around-dh-in-80-days/\">http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/around-dh-in-80-days/</a>. This project grew out of an information-sharing project that Digital Scholarship Coordinator Alex Gill undertook in the Columbia University Libraries to showcase new digital humanities work around the world.)) Other recent examples of successful Digital Humanities projects include Jen Rajchel’s senior thesis on Marianne Moore’s Bryn Mawr poetry, Harvard\'s efforts to reimagine teaching, and the work of Emory University faculty, technologists, and librarians to build interactive maps to track lynchings in Georgia. ((Jen Rajchel, “Introduction,” <i>Mooring Gaps: Marianne Moore’s Bryn Mawr Poetry</i>, n.d., <a href=\"http://mooreandpoetry.blogs.brynmawr.edu/\">http://mooreandpoetry.blogs.brynmawr.edu</a>. Rajchel reported that the director of library collections, the head of special collections, and the curator for rare books and manuscripts supported the project in terms of exploring collections, learning to use microfilm, and navigating copyright. “Lynchings in Georgia (1875-1930),” n.d., <a href=\"http://web.library.emory.edu/disc/projects/lynchings-georgia-1875-1930\">http://web.library.emory.edu/disc/projects/lynchings-georgia-1875-1930</a>. “Projects | metaLAB (at) Harvard,” n.d., <a href=\"http://metalab.harvard.edu/projects/\">http://metalab.harvard.edu/projects/</a>.))</li>\r\n	<li><b>Trend spotters</b> who scan the horizon for emerging tools and technologies, evaluate them, and introduce them in projects and undergraduate classrooms. Should libraries buy 3-D printers? How can libraries support MOOCs? Communities of practice like <a href=\"https://sites.google.com/a/edu-isis.org/isis/\">ISIS</a> and THATCamp help support the continuous professional development of librarians and information technologists through online seminars and drop-in sessions, where they can discuss emerging trends and best practices.</li>\r\n	<li><b>Adjudicators </b>who understand comprehensively the copyrights of moving and still images and other archival materials in print and digital form. Using resources like the <i><a href=\"http://policynotes.arl.org/\">Association of Research Libraries’ Policy Notes blog</a></i> and Nancy Sims’ <a href=\"http://blog.lib.umn.edu/copyrightlibn/\">excellent copyright guide blog</a>, teaching librarians and archivists knowledgeable in this area can help faculty and students navigate the murky and shifting copyright landscape. These adjudicators can support exciting research and projects that blend old formats with new media.</li>\r\n	<li><b>Project Managers </b>who coordinate larger-scale projects and facilitate collaborative projects among groups of students in undergraduate settings. Exciting initiatives like the winter and summer Digital Humanities Institutes bring faculty, librarians, students, and museum professionals together to tackle project development and management through their curriculums. Project management encompasses far more than ensuring that timelines are met and workload evenly distributed among team members. Project management requires leadership and vision to empower teams and to deploy new tools for new goals.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nWhile teaching librarians and archivists are uniquely positioned to help integrate student learning objectives with project outcomes and to create new opportunities for curriculum engagement, they are also facing a moment of creative destruction of some of the more traditional elements of librarianship. Embracing instructional work in the digital age means rethinking how teaching librarians and archivists spend their valuable time. For example, many teaching librarians are also selectors for library materials, so they could probably have more time for integrative teaching and digital project management if vendor-approval plans and patron-driven acquisitions automated collection-development work. While some might bemoan this as a loss of some of the “artisan” qualities of librarianship, it is an opportunity to reimagine public-facing positions to meet the needs of the rapidly changing higher-education landscape. As libraries move away from being simply content collectors to content creators, librarians and archivists must also make sometimes scary but necessary transitions. ((Brian Matthews, <i>“Think Like a Startup: </i><i>a white paper to inspire library entrepreneurialism,” </i>April 2012, <a href=\"http://hdl.handle.net/10919/18649\">http://hdl.handle.net/10919/18649</a>.))\r\n\r\nTogether, faculty and librarians can collaborate to make meaningful assignments and learning experiences for undergraduate students within a new digital framework.  Such partnerships ensure that students\' first forays into this area are successful, but can also help more advanced practitioners on more complicated projects. No student or faculty member can complete successful digital projects on their own; such projects require a village of librarians, archivists, technologists, faculty, and students to build, implement, and sustain them.','Teaching Librarians & Project Management: New Expectations for the Digital Age','','publish','open','open','','teaching-librarians-project-management-new-expectations-for-the-digital-age','','http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/around-dh-in-80-days/\nhttp://metalab.harvard.edu/projects/\nhttp://metalab.harvard.edu/projects/','2013-06-21 22:22:03','2013-06-21 22:22:03','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=4689',0,'post','',0),(4690,3,'2013-06-15 23:50:37','2013-06-15 23:50:37','Librarians have long been critical collaborators with their faculty in higher-education classroom settings, teaching research-education principles and providing one-on-one help with students to locate and evaluate sources for research projects. Until recently, most of these student projects have been research papers of varying lengths; each writing experience is a solo project that leads students to monkish behavior in solitary library carrels and dorm rooms. Today\'s students have new opportunities to apply critical thinking and research skills in transformative digital and collaborative projects. At Harvard, for example, students in an African and African American Studies course recently created digital stories about music, language, and digital media in former Portuguese colonies. ((Carla D. Martin, “Wikipedia, Storify, and Zeega in the Classroom,” <i>Storify</i>, n.d., <a href=\"http://storify.com/carladmartin/storify-the-classroom\">http://storify.com/carladmartin/storify-the-classroom</a>. This provides an overview of the work students undertook at Harvard University in Carla D. Martin’s fall 2012 course, African and African American Studies 114x: From Cesaria Evora to Dama do Bling: Language, Music, and Digital Media in the Former Portuguese Colonies. Martin reported that she met with librarians before the semester to discuss copyright issues and best practices for working with students on multimedia projects. The librarians also put Martin in touch with faculty who undertook similar projects.)) This type of venture requires a different level of support from and collaboration with librarians who work in classroom settings. The digital landscape demands new roles for teaching librarians and archivists as they shepherd and coordinate a range of projects, working with students and faculty from initial visions to implementation questions to final products.\n\nAs many courses begin to incorporate digital components, faculty must use course time to cover content <i>and</i> deal with the learning curve involved in utilizing new and unfamiliar digital tools. Faculty often do not have the time or capacity, for example, to teach students how to use blogging platforms or digital storytelling platforms. Teaching librarians and archivists are natural collaborators to facilitate digital learning in classrooms. Especially on liberal arts college campuses, it is increasingly common for teaching librarians to count among their responsibilities the teaching of digital tools and use of instructional technology. Librarians can provide one-stop support for faculty and students in classes with digital research and project components. ((Barbara A. Rockenbach, “Archives, Undergraduates, and Inquiry-Based Learning: Case Studies from Yale University Library,” <i>American Archivist</i> 74, no. 1 (2011): 297.)) Teaching librarians and archivists focus on process: how to use software, how to deploy archival sources, how to understand the finer points of copyright, and how to support and preserve projects and their accompanying data for the long term. We can leave the content to faculty; though we may be subject experts, one of our unsung strengths lies in project management, in the shepherding of student research from amorphous ideas to concrete sets of questions. We can collaborate with faculty to implement project guidelines that meet students’ learning goals and that can support digital projects on various platforms, including curated exhibits that engage a range of critical thinking skills.\n\n<b>Skills for Teaching Librarians &amp; Archivists in the Digital Age</b>\n\nTeaching librarians and archivists are no longer simply bibliographers or collections experts. Now they are research and technology sherpas, guiding faculty and students towards meaningful learning experiences and successful projects. The digital age requires us to have a new suite of skills that prepares us to support digital scholarship in classrooms or to communicate effectively with teams of technologists and information professionals—instructional technologists, reference archivists, GIS specialists, and visual resources librarians—on a range of projects. Teaching librarians and archivists may also be:\n<ul>\n	<li><b>Digital Humanists</b> who use the “methods of contemporary humanities in studying digital objects.” ((Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “The Humanities, Done Digitally,” <i>The Chronicle of Higher Education</i>, May 8, 2011, sec. The Digital Campus 2011, <a href=\"http://chronicle.com/article/The-Humanities-Done-Digitally/127382/\">http://chronicle.com/article/The-Humanities-Done-Digitally/127382/</a>.)) Projects like Around DH in 80 days provide an opportunity for seasoned DH practitioners and newbies alike to engage with the Digital Humanities in a global context. ((“Around DH in 80 Days,” <i>Global Outlook::Digital Humanities</i>, February 4, 2013, <a href=\"http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/around-dh-in-80-days/\">http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/around-dh-in-80-days/</a>. This project grew out of an information-sharing project that Digital Scholarship Coordinator Alex Gill undertook in the Columbia University Libraries to showcase new digital humanities work around the world.)) Other recent examples of successful Digital Humanities projects include Jen Rajchel’s senior thesis on Marianne Moore’s Bryn Mawr poetry, Harvard\'s efforts to reimagine teaching, and the work of Emory University faculty, technologists, and librarians to build interactive maps to track lynchings in Georgia. ((Jen Rajchel, “Introduction,” <i>Mooring Gaps: Marianne Moore’s Bryn Mawr Poetry</i>, n.d., <a href=\"http://mooreandpoetry.blogs.brynmawr.edu/\">http://mooreandpoetry.blogs.brynmawr.edu</a>. Rajchel reported that the director of library collections, the head of special collections, and the curator for rare books and manuscripts supported the project in terms of exploring collections, learning to use microfilm, and navigating copyright. “Lynchings in Georgia (1875-1930),” n.d., <a href=\"http://web.library.emory.edu/disc/projects/lynchings-georgia-1875-1930\">http://web.library.emory.edu/disc/projects/lynchings-georgia-1875-1930</a>. “Projects | metaLAB (at) Harvard,” n.d., <a href=\"http://metalab.harvard.edu/projects/\">http://metalab.harvard.edu/projects/</a>.))</li>\n	<li><b>Trend spotters</b> who scan the horizon for emerging tools and technologies, evaluate them, and introduce them in projects and undergraduate classrooms. Should libraries buy 3-D printers? How can libraries support MOOCs? Communities of practice like <a href=\"https://sites.google.com/a/edu-isis.org/isis/\">ISIS</a> and THATCamp help support the continuous professional development of librarians and information technologists through online seminars and drop-in sessions, where they can discuss emerging trends and best practices.</li>\n	<li><b>Adjudicators </b>who understand comprehensively the copyrights of moving and still images and other archival materials in print and digital form. Using resources like the <i><a href=\"http://policynotes.arl.org/\">Association of Research Libraries’ Policy Notes blog</a></i> and Nancy Sims’ <a href=\"http://blog.lib.umn.edu/copyrightlibn/\">excellent copyright guide blog</a>, teaching librarians and archivists knowledgeable in this area can help faculty and students navigate the murky and shifting copyright landscape. These adjudicators can support exciting research and projects that blend old formats with new media.</li>\n	<li><b>Project Managers </b>who coordinate larger-scale projects and facilitate collaborative projects among groups of students in undergraduate settings. Exciting initiatives like the winter and summer Digital Humanities Institutes bring faculty, librarians, students, and museum professionals together to tackle project development and management through their curriculums. Project management encompasses far more than ensuring that timelines are met and workload evenly distributed among team members. Project management requires leadership and vision to empower teams and to deploy new tools for new goals.</li>\n</ul>\nWhile teaching librarians and archivists are uniquely positioned to help integrate student learning objectives with project outcomes and to create new opportunities for curriculum engagement, they are also facing a moment of creative destruction of some of the more traditional elements of librarianship. Embracing instructional work in the digital age means rethinking how teaching librarians and archivists spend their valuable time. For example, many teaching librarians are also selectors for library materials, so they could probably have more time for integrative teaching and digital project management if vendor-approval plans and patron-driven acquisitions automated collection-development work. While some might bemoan this as a loss of some of the “artisan” qualities of librarianship, it is an opportunity to reimagine public-facing positions to meet the needs of the rapidly changing higher-education landscape. As libraries move away from being simply content collectors to content creators, librarians and archivists must also make sometimes scary but necessary transitions. [6]\n\nTogether, faculty and librarians can collaborate to make meaningful assignments and learning experiences for undergraduate students within a new digital framework.  Such partnerships ensure that students\' first forays into this area are successful, but can also help more advanced practitioners on more complicated projects. No student or faculty member can complete successful digital projects on their own; such projects require a village of librarians, archivists, technologists, faculty, and students to build, implement, and sustain them.','Teaching Librarians & Project Management: New Expectations for the Digital Age','','inherit','open','open','','4689-revision','','','2013-06-15 23:50:37','2013-06-15 23:50:37','',4689,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4689-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(4691,3,'2013-06-17 22:54:04','2013-06-17 22:54:04','Why address data curation in a journal that centers on the “use and theory of archives and special collections in higher education”? The five works collected in “Curating the Digital, Curating the Analog,” the latest installment of “Archives, Remixed,” connect archival theory, practice, and pedagogy to data curation. Acts of selecting, storing, and making content available for use are synonymous in analog special collections and data archives, but in each professional context, this set of activities has developed independently. Both domains would benefit from the other’s perspectives and experiences. At the same time, primary source materials are converging in new forms of research output, regardless of their category as datasets housed in data archives or as born-digital correspondence housed in a special collection. These and other conditions of data creation and record keeping make the case for a broad and inclusive consideration of data curation. As the contributions herein suggest, special collections libraries and archives need to shift from passive collecting practices to strategies that engage proactive stakeholders in the life cycle of information, and they need to begin to actively collect digital information. Data curators should draw upon traditional archival approaches to shape long-term stewardship. Once material is in the custody of any repository, linkages to other repositories should be created to enable new forms of inquiry and data manipulation. \r\n\r\nIn “Curating the Digital, Curating the Analog,” we offer an eclectic set of contributions intended to challenge, edify, reinforce, tease out, and contextualize what it means to do data curation across a range of domains. At the same time, readers will see there are certain strands, in the form of ideas or conceptual approaches, that tie the articles together. Long-held archival concepts, workflows, and roles demand evaluation and revision in order to adapt to born-digital objects. Plumbing the historical and theoretical underpinnings of archives in his article, Jefferson Bailey revisits the principle of respect des fonds, in effect turning this age-old principle on its head in a consideration of how to curate born-digital materials. In doing so, he calls attention to how users interact with online archives and how that differs markedly from what takes place in an analog environment. These and other issues of use and users that Bailey identifies also resonate with data curation pedagogy and practice, which Palmer, Weber, Muñoz, and Renear examine in their article. As they assert, understanding “research cultures” is foundational to data curation and to the “purposeful work” curatorial methods entail. The data curation curriculum that Palmer et al. propose takes an integrative view, combining established concepts of curation with tenets that are germane to “library, archival, and computer science.” In addition to research cultures, the development and management of collections and the representation of information are also key to the practice of data curation. The former reflects the heterogeneity and complexity of data and its life cycle, while the latter draws upon notions of identity, ontology, and provenance for organizing and characterizing information.\r\n\r\nIn their contribution, echoing Palmer et al., Andrew Asher and Lori Jahnke delve into the research culture of ethnographers, and thus into researchers’ perspectives on data curation, especially the collection and management of data. They address the ethical conundrums that can infuse certain aspects of data collection and sharing in the realm of ethnographic research, particularly in terms of fieldnotes, where the cultural, personal, and private are at obvious cross-purposes with the notion of public access. Asher and Jahnke also call out what might be described as a missing link in data management for researchers—programmatic education about it.\r\n\r\nShades of what Bailey and Palmer et al. argue in their articles, particularly with regard to user interaction, user communities, and, as the latter authors say, the “formal characteristics of information objects that carry digital data,” appear in Rachel Donahue’s contribution. Employing the artful device of comics, Donahue reports on a study of the digital preservation requirements for a highly popular video game about pioneer life in the West. With the aim of developing a curatorial method that could be applied to collections of games of similar formats, the study documented the significant properties of the video game and learned from players (users) what was important to preserve and retain about the game. Through her comic, Donahue essentially captures curation in action. \r\n\r\nMany of the topics regarding roles, responsibilities, archival practices, and data representation that arise in the aforementioned articles come together felicitously in the conversation between Kristin Yarmey and Lynn Yarmey, two practitioners who are sisters. Kristin, a digital services librarian, and Lynn, a data curator at a predominantly federally funded research center, engage in an informal dialogue. They discuss the ways in which their jobs converge because of shared objectives and diverge because of the different contexts of their work. Yarmey and Yarmey engage in a dialogue that also evokes the integrative view fleshed out by Palmer et al. Through their dialogue, they show how data curation in practice refers back to the disciplines of library and information science, archival studies, and computer science.\r\n  \r\nThe pieces gathered in “Curating the Digital, Curating the Analog” reflect recurring, pivotal ideas. One such idea is a keen appreciation for users of archives and the research communities to which they belong. Collectively, our authors advocate for close collaborations between archivists, data curators, and researchers. They emphasize education in data curation, suggesting it is as important to the researchers who collect data as it is to the practitioners who care for it. The representation, context, and description of data, all of which are crucial to data reuse, also constitute a pronounced theme. In essence, this issue explores the various roles, perspectives, and practices grounded in the commitment to preserve data, for the purpose of making it discoverable, accessible, and usable over the long term. It presents a narrative about data and data curation in archival, educational, research, and library settings that we think will prove relevant to readers of Archive Journal.\r\n','Curating the Analog, Curating the Digital','','publish','open','open','','curating-the-analog-curating-the-digital','','','2013-07-01 03:59:24','2013-07-01 03:59:24','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=4691',0,'post','',0),(4692,3,'2013-06-17 22:46:34','2013-06-17 22:46:34','','Curating the Analog, Curating the Digital','','inherit','open','open','','4691-revision','','','2013-06-17 22:46:34','2013-06-17 22:46:34','',4691,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4691-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(4693,3,'2013-06-17 22:52:00','2013-06-17 22:52:00','','Patricia Hswe','','publish','closed','closed','','cap-patricia-hswe','','','2013-07-08 16:39:55','2013-07-08 16:39:55','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?post_type=guest-author&#038;p=4693',0,'guest-author','',0),(4896,3,'2013-06-27 20:56:42','2013-06-27 20:56:42','','bb_hswe_webphoto','','inherit','open','open','','bb_hswe_webphoto','','','2013-06-27 20:56:42','2013-06-27 20:56:42','',4693,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/bb_hswe_webphoto.gif',0,'attachment','image/gif',0),(4695,3,'2013-06-17 22:52:45','2013-06-17 22:52:45','','Erin O\'Meara','','publish','closed','closed','','cap-erin-omeara','','','2013-07-08 16:29:30','2013-07-08 16:29:30','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?post_type=guest-author&#038;p=4695',0,'guest-author','',0),(4895,3,'2013-06-27 20:54:33','2013-06-27 20:54:33','','omeara_webphoto2','','inherit','open','open','','omeara_webphoto2','','','2013-06-27 20:54:33','2013-06-27 20:54:33','',4695,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/omeara_webphoto2.gif',0,'attachment','image/gif',0),(4697,3,'2013-06-17 22:53:54','2013-06-17 22:53:54','Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.\n\nLorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.\n\n&nbsp;','Curating the Analog, Curating the Digital','','inherit','open','open','','4691-revision-2','','','2013-06-17 22:53:54','2013-06-17 22:53:54','',4691,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4691-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(4698,3,'2013-06-18 00:03:53','2013-06-18 00:03:53','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nBy vastly increasing the volume and types of data that field researchers can collect, digital technologies have reshaped ethnographers’ relationship with their accumulated research data and materials. Whereas paper-based fieldnotes and other physical ethnographic records are often deposited in repositories and made accessible only after a scholar’s death, the emergence of born-digital materials has created and enhanced possibilities for rapidly sharing data, not only with other researchers but also with research subjects and the public at large via online repositories. While many researchers support the principal of public access to research data, making this data available online can compound the ethical dilemmas ethnographers face. Ethnographers often find themselves torn between contradictory imperatives to share data publically and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study. ((L. Jahnke, A. Asher, and S.D.C. Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>, CLIR Publication #154 (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2012).))\r\n\r\nUnlike experimental data, ethnographic data, by definition, are not reproducible. ((See Sydel Silverman, “Introduction,” in <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, ed. Sydel Silverman and Nancy J. Parezo (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1995), 1.)) Ethnographic fieldwork is inextricably linked to a particular time, place, and society, making the primary data of ethnographers unique and unrecoverable. For this reason, today’s ethnographic fieldnotes are particularly important to preserve as tomorrow’s historical records; they document observations of places and cultures that—because they are in a constant state of change—will never exist in the same configuration again. Since ethnographic fieldnotes provide the empirical basis for researchers’ public authority, it would likewise seem logical for fieldnotes and other ethnographic materials to be made available for verification purposes in online repositories as soon as possible after the publication of research reports, articles, or monographs.\r\n\r\nHowever, several characteristics of ethnographic materials cause them to be particularly difficult to make publically accessible. First, many ethnographic researchers are reluctant to share their data for personal reasons. Ethnographic fieldnotes are intensely personal documents for many researchers, who often view them as extremely valuable for their own work, but doubt that they would be useful to other researchers without the accompanying contexts and experiences in which the materials were collected. Secondly, ethnographic materials also routinely contain private, confidential, or culturally sensitive information about both research subjects and the researcher, which often requires time-consuming or costly procedures to redact, and may limit or prevent public dissemination and secondary analyses of the data. Finally, ethnographic materials are regularly collected in contexts with varying or conflicting cultural standards for consent and data use, raising ethical questions about the efficacy of archiving these materials. For these reasons, balancing the multiple imperatives of data sharing, informed consent, and confidentiality for research participants is a fundamental issue for ethnographers preparing to deposit their materials in an archives, and the ethics surrounding these decisions was one of the most common and recurring themes in the interviews conducted for the study we present here.\r\n\r\nUsing data gathered during the 2011-2012 academic year in a qualitative study of researchers’ data management and curation practices, ((This study was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and managed by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). See Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) this article examines the practical and ethical dilemmas ethnographers face as they work with diverse research materials across varying, and sometimes conflicting, cultural standards for consent and data use. By emphasizing the everyday practices of researchers, this study sought to gain a holistic understanding of the workflows involved in the creation, management, and preservation of research data in order to better comprehend researchers’ unmet needs within data curation processes. Twenty-three researchers from varying ranks working in a variety of social science disciplines at five universities ((Penn State University, Lehigh University, Bucknell University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Pennsylvania.)) participated in interviews for this study (see Table 1), which focused on how researchers collect and analyze data, how they manage and preserve these data, and what training they have had in data-curation practices.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4704\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"746\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE.jpg\"><img class=\" wp-image-4704 \" alt=\"Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants.  *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE-932x1024.jpg\" width=\"746\" height=\"819\" /></a> Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants. *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.[/caption]\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nAlthough scholars across many disciplines were grappling with the ethical and philosophical problems of data sharing—often in the absence of coherent policies for data archiving and release from funding agencies, professional organizations, or their employing institutions—this article will focus on the experiences of nine of these researchers who conducted ethnography as part of their data collection. Because ethnographic research involves a complex social interplay between researchers and respondents, often from differing cultural contexts, the management of these data presents unique difficulties for researchers who usually have little or no training in preservation, curation, or data-stewardship strategies. This article will examine how researchers navigate these difficulties when dealing with the two principal types of ethnographic data: fieldnotes—the diverse array of notes, writings, and other materials upon which researchers base their ethnographies ((Jean E. Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1.))—and the research artifacts, such as transcripts and audio or video recordings, produced from more formal, direct interactions with respondents.\r\n\r\n<b>The Data Sharing Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nFunding agencies—especially agencies administering public funds—are increasingly requiring qualitative research data to be made publically available. Since 1995, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)—a major source of funding for qualitative research in the United Kingdom—has required its awardees to archive their data as a condition of funding. ((See O. Parry and N. S. Mauthner, “Whose Data Are They Anyway?” <i>Sociology</i> 38, no. 1 (2004): 140-41.)) Similarly, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other US funding agencies (e.g. National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities) have begun to require formal data-management plans detailing how researchers will meet data-sharing expectations. Our assumption is that this trend will continue as both public and private funders seek maximum returns on their investment in research. While not always explicitly required, the goal of many of these policies is for research data to be deposited in an appropriate repository with online access for both other researchers and the public. For ethnographers, who are often accustomed to retaining exclusive rights over their fieldnotes and other materials, this can represent an uncomfortable shift in research practice, even when these repositories take into account the particular confidentiality and consent demands inherent to ethnographic research (discussed further below) and implement appropriate safeguards such as embargoing or redacting sensitive materials.\r\n\r\nIn principal, the ethnographic researchers we interviewed for this study saw data preservation and sharing as positive values, even if they were not sure about how to preserve and share data or who would potentially use the materials. When asked about what parts of her research data she would like to preserve, one anthropologist explained:\r\n<blockquote>That’s the thing—If you keep anything long enough it becomes interesting. . . . For myself . . . I would love to archive everything and maybe put some kind of time stamp on personal information where it can’t be released for some amount of time. It’s so hard to know what people in the future would be interested in. . . . I try to keep data in such a way that hopefully it would be comprehensible to someone else if they were willing to work through my crazy software. . . . If I had somebody’s fieldnotes from 100 years ago from my field site, I’d be totally fascinated by that, so you never know what people are going to be interested in. (2-16-120211) ((The number in parentheses is the participant identification number; please refer to Table 1.))</blockquote>\r\nThe scholarly societies to which many of these researchers belong also broadly support data sharing and potential reuse. The most recent 2012 revision on the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) ethics statement explicitly states that it is the obligation of the researcher to preserve records and make results accessible, “Anthropologists have an ethical responsibility for ensuring the integrity, preservation, and protection of their work” and, the “results of anthropological research should be disseminated in a timely fashion” provided it is not “at the expense of protecting confidentiality.” ((American Anthropological Association (AAA), <i>Statement on Ethics: Principals of Professional Responsibility</i>, 2012, <a href=\"http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf\">http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf</a>.)) The previous 1998 version also addressed data access and preservation, but not as systematically or forcefully. ((This version was slightly revised in 2009 to make minor changes to some of the statement’s language. Since this revision did not alter the structure or main points of the statement, we continue to refer the 1998 version (as does the AAA’s ethics website). American Anthropological Association, Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, Statement, 1998, B.4-5, C1.)) Likewise, the American Sociological Association sets similar expectations in the data sharing section of its Code of Ethics. ((American Sociological Association, Code of Ethics, 1999, 13.05.))\r\n\r\nThe benefits of data archiving and sharing for scholarly disciplines and the advancement of knowledge are straightforward: preserved materials can be subjected to secondary analysis, unnecessary duplication of research can be minimized, historical records can be maintained, and, importantly, scholars can independently evaluate the validity of published results by consulting the primary data. ((Libby Bishop, “Ethical Sharing and Reuse of Qualitative Data,” <i>Australian Journal of Social Issues</i> 44, no. 3 (2009): 266.)) Furthermore, online repositories might enable new forms of scholarship and writing. For the first time, materials preserved and made accessible online have made it feasible to make publically available the corpus of primary texts that form the basis of support for ethnographic argumentation. While a non-digitized, paper-based collection could also serve this purpose, it is unlikely that more than a handful of interested readers of a particular ethnography would physically travel to the repository to examine the documents. Repositories that make resources available online fundamentally change this dynamic. In <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive, </i>Johannes Fabian explores these possibilities by conducting what he describes as an experiment with “writing ethnography ‘in the presence of texts’” located in a publically accessible online repository. ((Johannes Fabian, <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive</i> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), vii.)) Fabian terms this genre of writing “commentary,” a text-centered form of ethnography that assumes his reader can simultaneously consult a primary text for her or himself via an online archive. ((Ibid., 9-13.))\r\n\r\nThe text Fabian utilizes is a conversation he and Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel had about a ceremony Kahenga conducted at Fabian’s home in Zaire in 1974. ((Ibid., 3.)) The transcription, translation, and an audio excerpt of the discussion are now housed in the Archives of Popular Swahili on the website of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa project. ((Johannes. Fabian, “‘Magic and Modernity’: A Conversation with a Herbalist and Practitioner of Magic,” trans. Johannes Fabian, <i>Archives of Popular Swahili</i> 7 (2005), <a href=\"http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction\">http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction</a>.)) Fabian argues that the repository of documents serves an important epistemological purpose by “mediat[ing] between . . . events, the presentation of evidence, and our aims and claims to produce anthropological knowledge.” ((Fabian, “Magic,” 123.)) By allowing the reader of an ethnography to interrogate and evaluate the primary data on which it is based, the archive reveals how ethnographies are composed through the confrontation between the researcher, his or her respondents, and the texts they co-create. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography</i>, 54. One does wonder, however, why Fabian considered a traditionally published monograph necessary to this project, rather than simply including it in the archive. Given that his book annotates the online texts using paragraph numbers that assume a specific online layout, it would seem more effective to have created hyperlinks between the commentary and the primary materials. In this way, the “experiment” seems incomplete.))\r\n\r\nFabian’s instructive experiment notwithstanding, for many researchers the practice of making ethnographic materials available online is fraught. Ethnography requires researchers to occupy a methodological position that mediates and translates between multiple cultural contexts. This positioning leads to a number of difficulties for ethnographers as they attempt to meet their obligations to multiple constituencies—including funders, cultural institutions, and the researcher’s employing university, in addition to the individuals and communities the researcher works with—while negotiating the processes of placing materials in archives and repositories. When working with human subjects, ethical pitfalls abound, and often ethnographers must resolve contradictions between these groups.\r\n\r\nAt a very basic level, policies requiring access to research data may “directly [contradict] some ethnic groups’ cultural traditions concerning secrecy and controlled access to information.” ((David Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates,” <i>Annual Review of Anthropology</i> 41, no. 1 (2012): 472, doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721. See also G. Isaac, “Whose Idea Was This?: Museums, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge,” <i>Current Anthropology</i> 52, no. 2 (2011) 211-233.)) For example, an anthropologist might gain access to knowledge that is secret, or restricted for cultural or social reasons. During his fieldwork with the Saramaka, a group in Suriname who descended from escaped African slaves, Richard Price gained knowledge about the “Old-Time People” who experienced the war for liberation from roughly 1680 to 1762. ((Richard Price, <i>First Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 5-6. For additional examples and a discussion of cross-cultural differences in relation to access to knowledge see Nancy J. Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage: CoPAR, Anthropological Records, and the Archival Community,” <i>The American Archivist </i>62 (1999): 285, note 24.)) The Saramaka consider knowledge about this time and these people powerful, dangerous, and restricted. Price struggled with the ethical implications of publishing a book within a different cultural system that uses this knowledge as its primary subject. ((Price, <i>First Time, </i>21-23.)) Price notes that by putting the information in a public document, he potentially “deprives [the] author of control (except perhaps via the language in which [the book] appears) over [his or her] audience.” ((Ibid., 23.)) This problem is compounded exponentially once information is made available online (as Price’s book now is, at least in part, in Google Books) by removing even the physical restrictions of a bound monograph.\r\n\r\nInformation need not be “exotic” to create publishing difficulties for ethnographers. For example, an ethnographer working in a corporate, government, or other institutional setting in the United States might be privy to proprietary or confidential information about a product or service that must be ethically and legally protected. A researcher in environmental engineering explained her process when conducting interviews:\r\n<blockquote>Another big concern is confidentiality because I record those conversations, and then there’s kind of an extended period of time in which I allow those who I’ve talked with to redact parts of our conversation if they’ve talked about things they would prefer to remain private. . . I’m talking to several companies about the development and production of their technologies and so there’s some proprietary information that comes up and that’s really the main concern. (5-20-020212)</blockquote>\r\nIndeed, accidental release of this type of information might put the researcher at as much legal risk as her respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen preparing to preserve ethnographic data, issues of ownership and authorship are also not always straightforward, and it is imperative that researchers communicate and address these potential problems with archivists, data curators, and repository and digital collection managers before depositing ethnographic materials. For example, consent forms for interviews might not clearly state who holds the copyright or who has a license to use the recording or transcripts, potentially leading to confusion over the legal status of these materials and making it more difficult for a researcher to transfer materials to an archives. Intellectual property and copyright are themselves culturally specific concepts, and a legal right to dispose of or deposit materials as a researcher sees fit does not equal an ethical right to do so. The people providing information, the funders, the institution that employs the researcher, and the community in which the researcher works all have a moral interest in the disposition of the data. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 142.)) Parry and Mauthner go so far as to say, “[B]ecause the construction of qualitative data is a joint endeavor between respondent and researcher, both parties should retain authorship/ownership rights over the data,” which creates “practical, legal and ethical implications for archiving and re-use.” ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 141.))\r\n\r\nSome researchers, including Fabian, argue that since ethnographers and their respondents are joint agents in creating ethnographic materials, both parties should be named to acknowledge their contributions. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) However, naming respondents as authors or contributors contradicts an ethnographer’s imperative to protect the confidentiality of their research participants, which is a basic standard required by most Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved research and by professional-ethics statements. While David Zeitlyn observes that “a default assumption that notes will be anonymized conflicts with an individual’s moral right to be recognized as the author of his or her words,” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 470.)) many, if not most, ethnographers would likely be uncomfortable naming their participants in almost any context, but especially in publically accessible online repositories. This is likely to hold true even if a researcher philosophically accepts that his or her authority to determine the level of sensitivity that the data require privileges the researcher’s position vis-à-vis his or her respondents. ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 148.))\r\n\r\nMany ethnographers thus understand themselves not so much as owners of their data, but rather as stewards or custodians of data that are produced by a complex set of relationships between researchers and respondents. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4-5.)) As the stewards of these data, researchers are often the de facto interpreters of the terms by which data are made available, choosing what and when to publish or deposit materials in repositories or archives. Despite his assertion that correspondents should be named, Fabian notes that he exercises this stewardship by attempting not to publish anything that might be dangerous or damaging to the people with whom he worked—a position that is probably made easier by the fact that the texts he is working with were already 30 years old when he transcribed and posted them on the web. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) Many researchers we interviewed adopted a similar “attitude of moral responsibility towards research participants, expressed in the way in which data are handled,” ((Annamaria Carusi and Marina Jirotka, “From Data Archive to Ethical Labyrinth,” <i>Qualitative Research</i> 9, no. 3 (2009): 292.)) citing ethical concerns about appropriate use of the data as well as issues of confidentiality and consent. Even for researchers who support public access to data, these concerns cause them to question funders’ data-sharing requirements. A researcher in education who was preparing to apply for additional funding to create a longitudinal dataset by re-interviewing her previous respondents noted her uncertainty:\r\n<blockquote>I know that a lot of places when you apply for funding they want eventually for [data] to become public. I haven’t had to deal with it, but I’ve definitely thought about it. . . . I want to make sure to preserve the qualitative data because it’s very important to me . . . so it’s a concern for me personally to save it. . . . [But] once it’s public, or shared between other people, I would like to get help eventually on making the data itself more confidential because they are just interview transcripts which, you know, there are a lot of [confidentiality] issues with that, and that I would have to [make the data itself more confidential] before I shared it. . . . I don’t know if there are limits to the extent to which I can make it public or not. (1-04-100511)</blockquote>\r\nIn the context of making their data accessible, these confidentiality and consent negotiations are some of the most difficult issues for scholars to resolve before depositing their ethnographic materials in data repositories or archives. These issues are also most effectively addressed as early in a research project as possible, so that researchers can implement the necessary practices and protocols to insure that confidentiality and consent can be assured in the long term prior to data collection. As Charles Humphrey and his colleagues discuss, the integral involvement of archivists and data-curation specialists in the planning stages and throughout qualitative research projects greatly increases the quality of the data products and decreases ethical problems associated with deposition in repositories and archives. ((Charles K. Humphrey, Carole A. Estabrooks, Judy R. Norris, Jane E. Smith, and Kathryn L. Hesketh, “Archivist on Board: Contributions to the Research Team,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000).)) As they point out, this collaboration is beneficial to both researchers and archivists, since good archival preparation practices are often synonymous with good research practices. ((Humphrey et al., “Archivist on Board,” 5.))\r\n\r\nDespite efforts by organizations such as the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR) to foster this type of collaboration ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage.”)) and educate ethnographers in data curation and archival preparation practices, ((CoPAR has released a series of fourteen bulletins outlining specific issues involved in the preservation of anthropological materials and addressed to practicing anthropologists. These bulletins are available at <a href=\"http://copar.org/bulletins.htm\">http://copar.org/bulletins.htm</a>. Unfortunately, since most of these bulletins were written in the late 1990s, many of the technology discussions are out of date. However, the conceptual discussions remain highly relevant.)) it appears that relatively few ethnographers seek out the assistance of archivists or data management specialists until after data collection is completed, unless funding requirements compelled them to do so. Of the ethnographers we interviewed, only two had consulted with data management services prior to the data collection phase of their research, both as a result of the NSF’s requirement that data-management plans be included in new funding proposals. Only one project had a systematic plan for depositing its ethnographic data in an archives, principally because this research was conducted as part of a very large and well-funded research initiative. This project had amassed some 40,000 pages of ethnographic fieldnotes, which were being preserved but not yet been shared publically. The researcher leading this project explained:\r\n<blockquote>It’s news to anthropologists that data should be made public. It’s not something that’s in their mindset. In fact they are appalled by it. . . . However, that [ethnographic] data was paid for using a million dollars of federal money and I’m using it with some of my grad students who are essentially doing secondary analysis of fieldnotes. I think that in the long run that data should be made public, and could be, but very carefully. . . . I don’t think that’s a problem . . . my guess is we’re going to get there. . . . A very new area now is “what do you do with electronic fieldnotes?” and “can those be made available for researchers?” If nothing else, I think this archive of fieldnotes . . .in 20 or 30 years could be a great historical source and should be preserved on that basis. So, I would like to see us work out ways of carefully having anthropological and ethnographic data made public too. (5-11-103011)</blockquote>\r\nIn working out the procedures for sharing these materials, this researcher went on to emphasize the paramount importance of protecting research participants’ confidentiality. Indeed, all of the ethnographers cited confidentiality concerns as one of the foremost issues that they would need to discuss and resolve with an archivist or repository manager before depositing their materials, making it perhaps the most critical area for developing collaborative practices between researchers, data curators, and archivists.\r\n\r\n<b>The Confidentiality Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nThe ethics statements of both the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association require researchers to protect the confidentiality of their respondents (although the AAA statement asserts that expectations of credit should also be addressed). ((ASA, Code of Ethics, 11; AAA, Statement on Ethics (Part 3), 7.)) Protecting research participants’ confidentiality is routinely an explicit promise within social science research, and is an almost universally assumed requirement of IRBs when reviewing research proposals. Setting aside the research participant’s potential moral right to authorship as discussed above, the nature of ethnographic research often renders the promise of confidentiality problematic, if not outright impossible. As Zachary Schrag observes, maintaining the confidentiality of fieldwork sites and research participants discussed in publications has been a perennial problem for social science researchers, as details necessary to make ethnographic and other fieldwork-based writing meaningful often simultaneously make these places and people identifiable, especially to people familiar with the location or topic. ((Zachary M. Schrag, <i>Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 15.)) Increasing confidentiality protections almost always come at the cost of decreasing the amount of contextual information included for the ethnography’s audience, and can effectively prevent data from being deposited in an archives or repository (or sometimes even collected). A sociologist recounted the difficulties he encountered on one project:\r\n<blockquote>I wanted to do life histories with priests [in central Pennsylvania], and part of the problem was . . . we got into a situation where people might tell me things about their personal lives that are sort of not confidential in the IRB sense but that might be upsetting to their congregations—like I talked to one priest who had been married three times, where if the congregation had known about that they would have been very upset. There’s nothing illegal about it; this person’s not shy about telling that, but it could have been damaging. But I had the sense that . . . if I went around and did these interviews, I didn’t want to destroy the data because I thought they had some historical importance. . . . [The IRB said,] “and when you get done with this study if you’re not going to destroy the data you have to store it in an archive for 50 years, and I checked with [university] archives and they said, “we’re not going to store anything like that.” . . . I wanted to preserve the data, but there was no way to do it. . . . I actually quit the project [because the IRB made it impossible to do]. (2-13-111411)</blockquote>\r\nWhile protecting research participants’ privacy can be difficult, even in carefully prepared and edited publications, the nature of ethnographic materials makes them especially difficult to confidentially preserve over time. Audio and video recordings present obvious confidentiality problems by capturing a respondents’ voice or image, ((For a discussion of the extreme difficulty of archiving video and audio data anonymously, see Louise Corti, Annette Day, and Gill Backhouse, “Confidentiality and Informed Consent: Issues for Consideration in the Preservation of and Provision of Access to Qualitative Data Archives,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 4.4c, <a href=\"http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024\">http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024</a>.)) but even interview transcripts can be problematic. A common practice in archiving ethnographic materials is to make attempts to remove potentially identifying information from archived transcripts. However, even these “anonymized” transcripts often still contain personal details that allow the possible identification of research participants. For example, in the interviews conducted for this study, participants regularly discussed their discipline and research interests. Coupled with the names of the universities where the research was conducted—which are contained in all of our research proposals and publications—this seemingly innocuous information would probably render any of our participants identifiable with a simple web search if the full interview transcripts were released. This might not seem like a significant risk for scholars describing projects that they routinely discuss publically, but depending on the other details contained in the transcript it might also be embarrassing or potentially damaging (for example, comments about university administrators, other colleagues, etc.). As is often the case with qualitative research, removing these contextual details would diminish, if not destroy, the usefulness of these data to future researchers—the ostensible audience for these materials. Unfortunately, each piece of contextual detail retained about a research participant to aid in data interpretation simultaneously creates more potential for identification.\r\n\r\nGiven technological advances, removing all conceivably identifying details might still be insufficient to guarantee that transcripts are rendered anonymous. In fact, anonymizing transcripts may soon no longer be technically possible. Arvind Narayana and his colleagues have demonstrated that it is possible to accurately identify anonymous online authors up to 20 percent of the time based on writing style alone, given a sufficient corpus of example texts. ((A. Narayanan, H. Paskov, N. Z. Gong, J. Bethencourt, E. Stefanov, E. C. R. Shin, and D. Song, “On the Feasibility of Internet-scale Author Identification,” Security and Privacy (SP), 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 20-23, 2012): 301, <a href=\"http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420\">http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420</a>.)) As more and more content moves online, one can only assume that these techniques will become more robust, so that identifying a participant from the vocabulary or speech patterns in a transcript may eventually become a matter of applying the correct software. These realities set up even the most well-intentioned researchers to fail to meet the obligations required by IRBs and the agreements made with their respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen archiving ethnographic materials, confidentiality can also be equally important for protecting the researcher. This is especially true for the archiving of fieldnotes, which are profoundly personal for many ethnographic researchers. Researchers are often quite ambivalent about these data, regularly describing feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, or embarrassment about their work and what it reveals about them as scholars. ((Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” 10-12.)) When talking about her data collection process, an anthropologist in our study observed:\r\n<blockquote>That’s the thing with fieldnotes, you never show them to anyone . . . as long as it works for you . . . it’s not like you have to show it to someone else and have them make sense of it, which is kind of a shame because it would be nice to have data in formats where people could, you know, sort of, archive that information. (2-16-120211)</blockquote>\r\nIn his study of fieldnote practices, Jean Jackson observes, “Many respondents point out that the highly personal nature of fieldnotes influences the extent of one’s willingness to share them: ‘Fieldnotes can reveal how worthless your work was, the lacunae, your linguistic incompetence, your not being made a blood brother, your childish temper.’” ((Ibid., 22.)) Anthropologist Simon Ottenberg describes his fieldnotes similarly, “[W]hen I was younger, I would have felt uncomfortable at the thought of someone else using my notes, whether I was alive or dead—they are so much a private thing, so much an aspect of personal field experience, so much a private language, so much part of my ego, my childhood [as an anthropologist], and my personal maturity.” ((Simon Ottenberg, “Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1990), 153.)) This attachment and ambivalence may make researchers reluctant to turn over control of their notes to an archives—especially one that has the purpose of making materials available publically on the internet. This professional practice not only makes it very difficult to substantiate or verify ethnographers’ data, suggesting a need for ethnographers to develop more proactive and sensitive data-sharing procedures, but also creates a situation where ethnographic materials are saved, but with inadequate plans for preservation. Zeitlyn notes, “Paradoxically most anthropologists want neither to destroy their field material nor archive it.” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.)) So, too, with our study: almost no one had made plans for their data beyond the short term, let alone the final dispensation of their materials at the end of their career or after their death.\r\n\r\nWhile archivists regularly assure scholars that the papers of “ordinary” or not-famous researchers are sometimes the most valuable, ((Catherine Fowler, \"Ethical Considerations,\" in Silverman and Parezo, <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, 64-65; Robert Leopold, “The Second Life of Ethnographic Fieldnotes,” <i>Ateliers d\'anthropologie</i> 32 (2008): 4.)) researchers themselves are often unconvinced. Many of our respondents had trouble imagining the potential audience for their data and primary materials, although one Environmental Studies researcher shared data on graffiti images she collected during fieldwork following a particular ethnic conflict event. The data were not directly related to her primary research questions, but another scholar used them in a Master’s thesis (and possibly in a future dissertation). Nevertheless, doubts about future usefulness contribute to researchers’ reluctance to undertake sometimes arduous and time-consuming data preservation and annotation tasks, such as redacting confidential information, and to neglect advance planning for the eventual archiving of their materials, such as assuring adequate consent procedures. This is potentially a key area of advocacy for data curators and archivists, who are well positioned to both educate researchers in the importance of preserving primary data for future generations of researchers, even if its immediate value is not apparent, and to provide tools such as cross-indexes and finding aids that make these data more useful and comparable. ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 301-305. See also Louise Corti, “Progress and Problems of Preserving and Providing Access to Qualitative Data for Social Research—The International Picture of an Emerging Culture,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 10.1.))\r\n\r\n<b>The Consent Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nBoth IRBs and disciplinary societies’ ethics statements emphasize the importance and necessity of obtaining informed consent from research participants. Given the possibility of archiving materials indefinitely, and especially for web publication, obtaining fully informed consent may be a futile endeavor. Libby Bishop points out that because researchers cannot adequately speculate on all the uses in which data might be employed, explicit consent is “logically impossible.” ((Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.)) However, Bishop also observes that this should not paralyze researchers from depositing their materials in archives, since consent for the primary research activity is in itself partial and no researcher can fully explain all information about any research project. ((Ibid., 264.)) Zeitlyn makes this point in another way, noting that cultural differences may also limit the ability of a researcher to obtain consent in a way that is recognizable to IRBs: “Once material is archived, it may be consulted by unknown others who might use it in novel ways. . . . Can a researcher obtain meaningful prior informed consent if the uses to which the material might be put in the future cannot be explained?” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471; see also Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 147.))\r\n\r\nWhile Bishop suggests responding to this problem by providing examples of how archived research might be reused or by obtaining open-ended consent, ((Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.)) others suggest a more comprehensive approach that understands consent as a process rather than a one-time event. ((Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 146; AAA, Code of Ethics, III.A.4.)) This approach presents significant difficulties when applied to the lifecycle of an entire ethnographic research project, especially once data and other fieldwork materials are deposited in an archives for the purpose of long-term access and preservation. If appropriate consent for archiving is not obtained at the outset of a project, or is sought when new uses are discovered for materials, contacting participants to authorize this usage can be extremely difficult and costly for ethnographers, if not outright impossible. Furthermore, a consent model that requires re-contacting participants also requires confidentiality or anonymization procedures to be reversible, meaning that the researcher must retain records that can link individuals to the materials about them. Retaining contact information or other identifying records is not best practice for assuring participant confidentiality, and in the case of truly sensitive research, doing so unnecessarily maintains records that could be subject to subpoena or otherwise compromised. For example, in 2012 the US Department of Justice issued a subpoena in connection with a murder investigation on behalf of Great Britain for access to oral history interviews conducted with Irish Republican Army and Loyalist paramilitary members as part of “The Belfast Project,” archived at Boston College’s Burns Library. While the project’s confidentiality agreement promised interviewees that these materials would be embargoed until their death, this guarantee was subject to exceptions required by American law; a point that may have been unclear to the research participants. Both Boston College and the researchers are presently contesting the subpoenas, but the initial rulings by a federal district court and the First Circuit Court of Appeals have found that the subpoenas are legal. ((The Society of American Archivists Oral History Section maintains a webpage summarizing the case and providing links to relevant documents at <a href=\"http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members\">http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members</a>.)) As this case demonstrates, whenever identifying information exists, there is a possibility that its disclosure can be compelled. From the point of view of research-participant confidentiality, it is therefore preferable to destroy materials that enable identification or re-contact as soon as possible after research is complete.\r\n\r\nSince anonymization is an all-or-nothing decision that must be irreversible, even for the researcher, if it is to be effective, ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.)) in order to make consent an ongoing process, one must also accept that the data cannot be made fully anonymous. The question then becomes how researchers can meaningfully extend consent decisions to include archives without rendering them unmanageable for their administrators or unnecessarily diminishing their analytical value. ((See Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294-95.)) Balancing the need to maintain appropriate levels of confidentiality with the administrative costs is a critical area for collaboration between researchers, archivists, and data specialists. Fully anonymizing datasets is probably neither necessary, nor cost effective, for relatively low-risk materials, ((See Corti, Day, and Backhouse,\" Confidentiality and Informed Consent,\" 4.4, on the expense of creating anonymized archives.)) but both the researcher and the archivists must fully understand the potential risk scenarios before these decisions can be made, particularly in an environment where privacy protections are an increasing concern for research participants. While discussing the challenges he faces in complying with funder’s public access requirements, a sociologist observed:\r\n<blockquote>Clearly the biggest problem is the problem of protection of privacy. The concern of privacy has been ramped up tremendously over the last 10 or 15 years, and the process of getting permission to analyze data can be difficult, but a trend in social science data is to include more and more information that\'s sensitive. . . . I think the field is trying to now establish appropriate levels of protection for particular kinds of data and is trying to balance this problem of privacy with public access. And it is a challenge and it’s going to require some new modes of doing things. (5-11-103111)</blockquote>\r\nDeveloping these modes of work and processes of consent requires not only the participation of researchers and scholarly societies, but also intensive cooperation with data management specialists, technologists, and archivists. ((ICPSR’s “Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving Phase 5: Preparing Data for Sharing” provides a model for these processes. See <a href=\"http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html\">http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html</a>.))\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusions and Recommendations</b>\r\n\r\nResearchers and archivists alike face tremendous challenges in effectively preserving ethnographic research data and providing meaningful access for researchers and other stakeholders while simultaneously protecting sensitive data. In order to be effective, data sharing, confidentiality, and consent imperatives all require the active participation and investment of researchers themselves. Decisions about access, issues of authorship attribution, adequate consent, and the level of confidentially required cannot be made without the input of someone who is deeply knowledgeable about the contexts in which the research took place. However, as we have seen, none of these decision processes necessarily end at the moment when the materials are deposited in an archives or repository, and a researcher’s ethical obligation to his or her research participants does not end once he or she has transferred responsibility for their preservation. This sense of responsibility makes many researchers reluctant to relinquish control over their ethnographic materials, lest changing political, social, or cultural conditions necessitates a more restrictive approach to data access than was initially required.\r\n\r\nFor example, an Environmental Studies researcher noted that currently her data does not present much risk to her respondents:\r\n<blockquote>Most of the data I’ve collected really have limited privacy issues or any kind of harm that could come to respondents. There are some topics that I’ve looked at, that depending on, when—you know, timeliness—at what point these were published, that identifying information could be problematic. In [central Asian country] it’s a lot easier—at least currently—the situation for my topics isn’t dangerous. That doesn’t mean it can’t be in the future and if I extended the research to neighboring countries then I would probably have some more serious confidentiality issues. (2-12-111011)</blockquote>\r\nIf the political situation for her respondents changed, however, this researcher might be ethically obligated to change the access conditions of any materials that she had archived, even if her consent procedures had addressed this eventuality. Repositories for ethnographic materials must be careful to include procedures to respond to these types of situations in their donor agreements, and researchers should discuss the unique qualities of ethnographic materials prior to their deposit. As Parezo points out, “it is unethical and unreasonable to expect the archival community to guess which fieldnotes contain sensitive information and what are reasonable use restrictions.” ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 285.))\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, preparing materials for deposit into an archives is often a low priority for ethnographers for a variety of reasons, and the archiving of ethnographic data is further hindered by a persistent lack of training. While comprehensive historical review is beyond the scope of this article, Silverman already noted the problem of a lack of formal training in data collection and management practices among anthropologists almost 20 years ago, ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 6.)) before the rise of many of the complications that the expansion of digital data collection created. Almost none of the scholars we interviewed reported that data curation or stewardship training was part of their graduate curriculum, and data management was usually only addressed narrowly in relation to methodological approaches and problems. The ethical and practical difficulties involved in managing and preserving large amounts of research data were rarely addressed, with most researchers acquiring the skills they needed via trial and error. ((Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) None of the scholars interviewed during this study expressed satisfaction with their level of expertise in data management, and few had access to individuals who could provide knowledgeable guidance. While it would be preferable for graduate curricula to include this type of training, it seems unlikely that this change will occur in the near term. It is, therefore, likely that archivists and data specialists will need to provide this training, preferably by developing relationships with ethnographic researchers as early as possible in the research process.\r\n\r\nThe lack of confidence in their data-management training compounds researchers’ apprehension about the ethical issues contained in their data. Researchers are naturally—and rightfully—conservative about the potential risks in sharing data, especially if they are not convinced they can protect their respondents’ confidentiality, or that they have obtained appropriate consent—issues that the difficulties of cross-cultural communication make more complex. Without such assurances that these ethical imperatives can be addressed, many researchers are unlikely to invest in archiving their materials. “In many cases, their desire to avoid the ethical risks of inappropriate data release may outweigh the costs of potential data loss.” ((Ibid., 17.))\r\n\r\nBecause of these interrelated concerns, it is critical that the archival and data curation systems available to ethnographic researchers have multiple and fine-grained levels of access and privacy controls. Tools must be developed that can appropriately manage confidential data and that allow researchers, working in conjunction with their respondents, to exercise control over their data, administer who has access to it, and account for culturally specific restrictions on data use. ((Ibid., 17-18.)) One example of a system attempting to address these requirements is the Murkutu content management system (<a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/\">http://www.mukurtu.org/</a>), which makes cultural protocols a fundamental part of access to materials. This allows for the easy creation of fine-grained and culturally appropriate user groups with specifically defined usage rights, and it is being developed in cooperation with indigenous communities. ((A list of community groups and organizations participating in the Mukurtu project is available at <a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html\">http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html</a>.))\r\n\r\nBecause the nature of ethnographic materials makes them potentially subject to ongoing and evolving dilemmas of confidentiality and consent, archivists and data managers should understand that these materials may require ongoing curation, preferably through processes and procedures that incorporate researchers in a collaborative and meaningful way. Although many researchers would welcome the ability to more easily share their data, particularly in collaborative projects and in response to data-sharing requirements, they are almost universally resistant to any arrangement in which they would relinquish control over access to the data. As one anthropologist described:\r\n<blockquote>People don’t hesitate, at all, to share data with collaborators that they trust. … If you provide a mechanism for collaboration, even if it’s just Google Docs or something, you know, people share data easily and freely. It’s when it becomes an anonymous process that they seem to get balky. (1-02-100511)</blockquote>\r\nThe goal of making materials publically available online, then, will require archival systems and processes that are cognizant of the complex social relationships embedded within ethnographic materials, not only between the researcher and his or her respondents, but also between and among the many stakeholders in ethnographic data. The development of additional policies, ethical guidelines, and best practices by disciplinary organizations, funding agencies, universities, and cultural institutions could further aid researchers and archivists in navigating the ethical dilemmas contained in the archival process.\r\n\r\nBecause much ethnographic data is collected by individuals in relatively small and often idiosyncratic datasets, it is especially vulnerable to loss due to benign neglect or lack or resources, even if the data are historically unique. A sociologist described one such vulnerable dataset:\r\n<blockquote>We did life histories of 45 people in a [church] congregation in [central Pennsylvania town]. . . . It’s probably the only body of material on a single congregation of that depth and complexity that exists, and I’m just too lazy to have figured out what to do with it and write it up and everything, but you could imagine somewhere somebody who wants to do research on congregations would find this incredibly valuable. But what’s going to happen to it [in the long term]? And what’s going to happen to it is, the copies I have will end up in a trash can, and my computer hard drive will eventually crash or get outmoded or get erased, and that’ll be the end of it [if there isn’t a place to archive it]. (2-13-111411)</blockquote>\r\nIn order to prevent these losses, data management specialists and archivists must specifically curate these materials. They must also build relationships with ethnographers to resolve the unique ethical dilemmas these data present and the uneasy tensions between researchers’ desire to share data publically and obligations to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study.\r\n\r\nFinally, despite the acknowledged importance and value of archival materials to the disciplines and future researchers, academic rewards systems offer very little payoff for the work that goes into making ethnographic materials available, and ethnographic researchers are often under-resourced in the funding, time, and personnel support needed for preparing materials for archiving. ((The NSF’s recent decision to list datasets as one of the research products to be included in the section of its grant proposals where researchers describe their qualifications does suggest, however, that the current rewards system may gradually be changing (see <a href=\"http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp\">http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp</a>).)) Archivists must therefore work to make archival systems and the development of archival processes and policies as straightforward for researchers as possible, ideally assisting in integrating the development of metadata and other secondary materials (for example, codebooks, explanatory materials, finding aids, and ontologies) necessary to archiving and ensuring the long-term usefulness of primary data as early in the research process as possible. Likewise, funding agencies should improve funding for long-term data management, preservation, and curatorial services, either directly or via guidelines to institutions for recouping indirect costs, especially when the grant mandates archiving or public data accessibility. By providing these supports, archivists and funders would greatly assist researchers in responding to the imperatives of providing access to data and assuring the confidentiality and consent of their respondents, as well as resolving the ethical dilemmas contained in their data, thereby helping assure the preservation of irreplaceable ethnographic information.','Curating the Ethnographic Moment','','publish','open','open','','curating-the-ethnographic-moment','','','2013-07-06 23:24:04','2013-07-06 23:24:04','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=4698',0,'post','',0),(4699,3,'2013-06-17 22:55:10','2013-06-17 22:55:10','','Curating the Ethnographic Moment','','inherit','open','open','','4698-revision','','','2013-06-17 22:55:10','2013-06-17 22:55:10','',4698,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4698-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(4700,3,'2013-06-17 22:56:35','2013-06-17 22:56:35','','Andrew Asher','','publish','closed','closed','','cap-andrew-asher','','','2013-07-10 19:45:48','2013-07-10 19:45:48','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?post_type=guest-author&#038;p=4700',0,'guest-author','',0),(4701,3,'2013-06-17 22:58:54','2013-06-17 22:58:54','','Lori M. Jahnke','','publish','closed','closed','','cap-lori-m-jahnke','','','2013-07-10 19:46:57','2013-07-10 19:46:57','',0,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/?post_type=guest-author&#038;p=4701',0,'guest-author','',0),(4718,3,'2013-06-17 23:52:26','2013-06-17 23:52:26','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nBy vastly increasing the volume and types of data that field researchers can collect, digital technologies have reshaped ethnographers’ relationship with their accumulated research data and materials. Whereas paper-based fieldnotes and other physical ethnographic records are often deposited in repositories and made accessible only after a scholar’s death, the emergence of born-digital materials has created and enhanced possibilities for rapidly sharing data, not only with other researchers but also with research subjects and the public at large via online repositories. While many researchers support the principal of public access to research data, making this data available online can compound the ethical dilemmas ethnographers face. Ethnographers often find themselves torn between contradictory imperatives to share data publically and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study. ((L. Jahnke, A. Asher, and S.D.C. Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>, CLIR Publication #154 (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2012).))\r\n\r\nUnlike experimental data, ethnographic data, by definition, are not reproducible. ((See Sydel Silverman, “Introduction,” in <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, ed. Sydel Silverman and Nancy J. Parezo (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1995), 1.)) Ethnographic fieldwork is inextricably linked to a particular time, place, and society, making the primary data of ethnographers unique and unrecoverable. For this reason, today’s ethnographic fieldnotes are particularly important to preserve as tomorrow’s historical records; they document observations of places and cultures that—because they are in a constant state of change—will never exist in the same configuration again. Since ethnographic fieldnotes provide the empirical basis for researchers’ public authority, it would likewise seem logical for fieldnotes and other ethnographic materials to be made available for verification purposes in online repositories as soon as possible after the publication of research reports, articles, or monographs.\r\n\r\nHowever, several characteristics of ethnographic materials cause them to be particularly difficult to make publically accessible. First, many ethnographic researchers are reluctant to share their data for personal reasons. Ethnographic fieldnotes are intensely personal documents for many researchers, who often view them as extremely valuable for their own work, but doubt that they would be useful to other researchers without the accompanying contexts and experiences in which the materials were collected. Secondly, ethnographic materials also routinely contain private, confidential, or culturally sensitive information about both research subjects and the researcher, which often requires time-consuming or costly procedures to redact, and may limit or prevent public dissemination and secondary analyses of the data. Finally, ethnographic materials are regularly collected in contexts with varying or conflicting cultural standards for consent and data use, raising ethical questions about the efficacy of archiving these materials. For these reasons, balancing the multiple imperatives of data sharing, informed consent, and confidentiality for research participants is a fundamental issue for ethnographers preparing to deposit their materials in an archives, and the ethics surrounding these decisions was one of the most common and recurring themes in the interviews conducted for the study we present here.\r\n\r\nUsing data gathered during the 2011-2012 academic year in a qualitative study of researchers’ data management and curation practices, ((This study was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and managed by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). See Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) this article examines the practical and ethical dilemmas ethnographers face as they work with diverse research materials across varying, and sometimes conflicting, cultural standards for consent and data use. By emphasizing the everyday practices of researchers, this study sought to gain a holistic understanding of the workflows involved in the creation, management, and preservation of research data in order to better comprehend researchers’ unmet needs within data curation processes. Twenty-three researchers from varying ranks working in a variety of social science disciplines at five universities ((Penn State University, Lehigh University, Bucknell University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Pennsylvania.)) participated in interviews for this study (see Table 1), which focused on how researchers collect and analyze data, how they manage and preserve these data, and what training they have had in data-curation practices.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4704\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"273\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4704\" alt=\"Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants.  *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE-273x300.jpg\" width=\"273\" height=\"300\" /></a> Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants. *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.[/caption]\r\n\r\nAlthough scholars across many disciplines were grappling with the ethical and philosophical problems of data sharing—often in the absence of coherent policies for data archiving and release from funding agencies, professional organizations, or their employing institutions—this article will focus on the experiences of nine of these researchers who conducted ethnography as part of their data collection. Because ethnographic research involves a complex social interplay between researchers and respondents, often from differing cultural contexts, the management of these data presents unique difficulties for researchers who usually have little or no training in preservation, curation, or data-stewardship strategies. This article will examine how researchers navigate these difficulties when dealing with the two principal types of ethnographic data: fieldnotes—the diverse array of notes, writings, and other materials upon which researchers base their ethnographies ((Jean E. Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1.))—and the research artifacts, such as transcripts and audio or video recordings, produced from more formal, direct interactions with respondents.\r\n\r\n<b>The Data Sharing Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nFunding agencies—especially agencies administering public funds—are increasingly requiring qualitative research data to be made publically available. Since 1995, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)—a major source of funding for qualitative research in the United Kingdom—has required its awardees to archive their data as a condition of funding. ((See O. Parry and N. S. Mauthner, “Whose Data Are They Anyway?” <i>Sociology</i> 38, no. 1 (2004): 140-41.)) Similarly, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other US funding agencies (e.g. National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities) have begun to require formal data-management plans detailing how researchers will meet data-sharing expectations. Our assumption is that this trend will continue as both public and private funders seek maximum returns on their investment in research. While not always explicitly required, the goal of many of these policies is for research data to be deposited in an appropriate repository with online access for both other researchers and the public. For ethnographers, who are often accustomed to retaining exclusive rights over their fieldnotes and other materials, this can represent an uncomfortable shift in research practice, even when these repositories take into account the particular confidentiality and consent demands inherent to ethnographic research (discussed further below) and implement appropriate safeguards such as embargoing or redacting sensitive materials.\r\n\r\nIn principal, the ethnographic researchers we interviewed for this study saw data preservation and sharing as positive values, even if they were not sure about how to preserve and share data or who would potentially use the materials. When asked about what parts of her research data she would like to preserve, one anthropologist explained:\r\n\r\nThat’s the thing—If you keep anything long enough it becomes interesting. . . . For myself . . . I would love to archive everything and maybe put some kind of time stamp on personal information where it can’t be released for some amount of time. It’s so hard to know what people in the future would be interested in. . . . I try to keep data in such a way that hopefully it would be comprehensible to someone else if they were willing to work through my crazy software. . . . If I had somebody’s fieldnotes from 100 years ago from my field site, I’d be totally fascinated by that, so you never know what people are going to be interested in. (2-16-120211) ((The number in parentheses is the participant identification number; please refer to Table 1.))\r\n\r\nThe scholarly societies to which many of these researchers belong also broadly support data sharing and potential reuse. The most recent 2012 revision on the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) ethics statement explicitly states that it is the obligation of the researcher to preserve records and make results accessible, “Anthropologists have an ethical responsibility for ensuring the integrity, preservation, and protection of their work” and, the “results of anthropological research should be disseminated in a timely fashion” provided it is not “at the expense of protecting confidentiality.” ((American Anthropological Association (AAA), <i>Statement on Ethics: Principals of Professional Responsibility</i>, 2012, <a href=\"http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf\">http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf</a>.)) The previous 1998 version also addressed data access and preservation, but not as systematically or forcefully. ((This version was slightly revised in 2009 to make minor changes to some of the statement’s language. Since this revision did not alter the structure or main points of the statement, we continue to refer the 1998 version (as does the AAA’s ethics website). American Anthropological Association, Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, Statement, 1998, B.4-5, C1.)) Likewise, the American Sociological Association sets similar expectations in the data sharing section of its Code of Ethics. ((American Sociological Association, Code of Ethics, 1999, 13.05.))\r\n\r\nThe benefits of data archiving and sharing for scholarly disciplines and the advancement of knowledge are straightforward: preserved materials can be subjected to secondary analysis, unnecessary duplication of research can be minimized, historical records can be maintained, and, importantly, scholars can independently evaluate the validity of published results by consulting the primary data. ((Libby Bishop, “Ethical Sharing and Reuse of Qualitative Data,” <i>Australian Journal of Social Issues</i> 44, no. 3 (2009): 266.)) Furthermore, online repositories might enable new forms of scholarship and writing. For the first time, materials preserved and made accessible online have made it feasible to make publically available the corpus of primary texts that form the basis of support for ethnographic argumentation. While a non-digitized, paper-based collection could also serve this purpose, it is unlikely that more than a handful of interested readers of a particular ethnography would physically travel to the repository to examine the documents. Repositories that make resources available online fundamentally change this dynamic. In <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive, </i>Johannes Fabian explores these possibilities by conducting what he describes as an experiment with “writing ethnography ‘in the presence of texts’” located in a publically accessible online repository. ((Johannes Fabian, <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive</i> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), vii.)) Fabian terms this genre of writing “commentary,” a text-centered form of ethnography that assumes his reader can simultaneously consult a primary text for her or himself via an online archive. ((Ibid., 9-13.))\r\n\r\nThe text Fabian utilizes is a conversation he and Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel had about a ceremony Kahenga conducted at Fabian’s home in Zaire in 1974. ((Ibid., 3.)) The transcription, translation, and an audio excerpt of the discussion are now housed in the Archives of Popular Swahili on the website of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa project. ((Johannes. Fabian, “‘Magic and Modernity’: A Conversation with a Herbalist and Practitioner of Magic,” trans. Johannes Fabian, <i>Archives of Popular Swahili</i> 7 (2005), <a href=\"http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction\">http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction</a>.)) Fabian argues that the repository of documents serves an important epistemological purpose by “mediat[ing] between . . . events, the presentation of evidence, and our aims and claims to produce anthropological knowledge.” ((Fabian, “Magic,” 123.)) By allowing the reader of an ethnography to interrogate and evaluate the primary data on which it is based, the archive reveals how ethnographies are composed through the confrontation between the researcher, his or her respondents, and the texts they co-create. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography</i>, 54. One does wonder, however, why Fabian considered a traditionally published monograph necessary to this project, rather than simply including it in the archive. Given that his book annotates the online texts using paragraph numbers that assume a specific online layout, it would seem more effective to have created hyperlinks between the commentary and the primary materials. In this way, the “experiment” seems incomplete.))\r\n\r\nFabian’s instructive experiment notwithstanding, for many researchers the practice of making ethnographic materials available online is fraught. Ethnography requires researchers to occupy a methodological position that mediates and translates between multiple cultural contexts. This positioning leads to a number of difficulties for ethnographers as they attempt to meet their obligations to multiple constituencies—including funders, cultural institutions, and the researcher’s employing university, in addition to the individuals and communities the researcher works with—while negotiating the processes of placing materials in archives and repositories. When working with human subjects, ethical pitfalls abound, and often ethnographers must resolve contradictions between these groups.\r\n\r\nAt a very basic level, policies requiring access to research data may “directly [contradict] some ethnic groups’ cultural traditions concerning secrecy and controlled access to information.” ((David Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates,” <i>Annual Review of Anthropology</i> 41, no. 1 (2012): 472, doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721. See also G. Isaac, “Whose Idea Was This?: Museums, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge,” <i>Current Anthropology</i> 52, no. 2 (2011) 211-233.)) For example, an anthropologist might gain access to knowledge that is secret, or restricted for cultural or social reasons. During his fieldwork with the Saramaka, a group in Suriname who descended from escaped African slaves, Richard Price gained knowledge about the “Old-Time People” who experienced the war for liberation from roughly 1680 to 1762. ((Richard Price, <i>First Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 5-6. For additional examples and a discussion of cross-cultural differences in relation to access to knowledge see Nancy J. Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage: CoPAR, Anthropological Records, and the Archival Community,” <i>The American Archivist </i>62 (1999): 285, note 24.)) The Saramaka consider knowledge about this time and these people powerful, dangerous, and restricted. Price struggled with the ethical implications of publishing a book within a different cultural system that uses this knowledge as its primary subject. ((Price, <i>First Time, </i>21-23.)) Price notes that by putting the information in a public document, he potentially “deprives [the] author of control (except perhaps via the language in which [the book] appears) over [his or her] audience.” ((Ibid., 23.)) This problem is compounded exponentially once information is made available online (as Price’s book now is, at least in part, in Google Books) by removing even the physical restrictions of a bound monograph.\r\n\r\nInformation need not be “exotic” to create publishing difficulties for ethnographers. For example, an ethnographer working in a corporate, government, or other institutional setting in the United States might be privy to proprietary or confidential information about a product or service that must be ethically and legally protected. A researcher in environmental engineering explained her process when conducting interviews:\r\n\r\nAnother big concern is confidentiality because I record those conversations, and then there’s kind of an extended period of time in which I allow those who I’ve talked with to redact parts of our conversation if they’ve talked about things they would prefer to remain private. . . I’m talking to several companies about the development and production of their technologies and so there’s some proprietary information that comes up and that’s really the main concern. (5-20-020212)\r\n\r\nIndeed, accidental release of this type of information might put the researcher at as much legal risk as her respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen preparing to preserve ethnographic data, issues of ownership and authorship are also not always straightforward, and it is imperative that researchers communicate and address these potential problems with archivists, data curators, and repository and digital collection managers before depositing ethnographic materials. For example, consent forms for interviews might not clearly state who holds the copyright or who has a license to use the recording or transcripts, potentially leading to confusion over the legal status of these materials and making it more difficult for a researcher to transfer materials to an archives. Intellectual property and copyright are themselves culturally specific concepts, and a legal right to dispose of or deposit materials as a researcher sees fit does not equal an ethical right to do so. The people providing information, the funders, the institution that employs the researcher, and the community in which the researcher works all have a moral interest in the disposition of the data. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 142.)) Parry and Mauthner go so far as to say, “[B]ecause the construction of qualitative data is a joint endeavor between respondent and researcher, both parties should retain authorship/ownership rights over the data,” which creates “practical, legal and ethical implications for archiving and re-use.” ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 141.))\r\n\r\nSome researchers, including Fabian, argue that since ethnographers and their respondents are joint agents in creating ethnographic materials, both parties should be named to acknowledge their contributions. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) However, naming respondents as authors or contributors contradicts an ethnographer’s imperative to protect the confidentiality of their research participants, which is a basic standard required by most Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved research and by professional-ethics statements. While David Zeitlyn observes that “a default assumption that notes will be anonymized conflicts with an individual’s moral right to be recognized as the author of his or her words,” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 470.)) many, if not most, ethnographers would likely be uncomfortable naming their participants in almost any context, but especially in publically accessible online repositories. This is likely to hold true even if a researcher philosophically accepts that his or her authority to determine the level of sensitivity that the data require privileges the researcher’s position vis-à-vis his or her respondents. ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 148.))\r\n\r\nMany ethnographers thus understand themselves not so much as owners of their data, but rather as stewards or custodians of data that are produced by a complex set of relationships between researchers and respondents. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4-5.)) As the stewards of these data, researchers are often the de facto interpreters of the terms by which data are made available, choosing what and when to publish or deposit materials in repositories or archives. Despite his assertion that correspondents should be named, Fabian notes that he exercises this stewardship by attempting not to publish anything that might be dangerous or damaging to the people with whom he worked—a position that is probably made easier by the fact that the texts he is working with were already 30 years old when he transcribed and posted them on the web. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) Many researchers we interviewed adopted a similar “attitude of moral responsibility towards research participants, expressed in the way in which data are handled,” ((Annamaria Carusi and Marina Jirotka, “From Data Archive to Ethical Labyrinth,” <i>Qualitative Research</i> 9, no. 3 (2009): 292.)) citing ethical concerns about appropriate use of the data as well as issues of confidentiality and consent. Even for researchers who support public access to data, these concerns cause them to question funders’ data-sharing requirements. A researcher in education who was preparing to apply for additional funding to create a longitudinal dataset by re-interviewing her previous respondents noted her uncertainty:\r\n\r\nI know that a lot of places when you apply for funding they want eventually for [data] to become public. I haven’t had to deal with it, but I’ve definitely thought about it. . . . I want to make sure to preserve the qualitative data because it’s very important to me . . . so it’s a concern for me personally to save it. . . . [But] once it’s public, or shared between other people, I would like to get help eventually on making the data itself more confidential because they are just interview transcripts which, you know, there are a lot of [confidentiality] issues with that, and that I would have to [make the data itself more confidential] before I shared it. . . . I don’t know if there are limits to the extent to which I can make it public or not. (1-04-100511)\r\n\r\nIn the context of making their data accessible, these confidentiality and consent negotiations are some of the most difficult issues for scholars to resolve before depositing their ethnographic materials in data repositories or archives. These issues are also most effectively addressed as early in a research project as possible, so that researchers can implement the necessary practices and protocols to insure that confidentiality and consent can be assured in the long term prior to data collection. As Charles Humphrey and his colleagues discuss, the integral involvement of archivists and data-curation specialists in the planning stages and throughout qualitative research projects greatly increases the quality of the data products and decreases ethical problems associated with deposition in repositories and archives. ((Charles K. Humphrey, Carole A. Estabrooks, Judy R. Norris, Jane E. Smith, and Kathryn L. Hesketh, “Archivist on Board: Contributions to the Research Team,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000).)) As they point out, this collaboration is beneficial to both researchers and archivists, since good archival preparation practices are often synonymous with good research practices. ((Humphrey et al., “Archivist on Board,” 5.))\r\n\r\nDespite efforts by organizations such as the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR) to foster this type of collaboration ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage.”)) and educate ethnographers in data curation and archival preparation practices, ((CoPAR has released a series of fourteen bulletins outlining specific issues involved in the preservation of anthropological materials and addressed to practicing anthropologists. These bulletins are available at <a href=\"http://copar.org/bulletins.htm\">http://copar.org/bulletins.htm</a>. Unfortunately, since most of these bulletins were written in the late 1990s, many of the technology discussions are out of date. However, the conceptual discussions remain highly relevant.)) it appears that relatively few ethnographers seek out the assistance of archivists or data management specialists until after data collection is completed, unless funding requirements compelled them to do so. Of the ethnographers we interviewed, only two had consulted with data management services prior to the data collection phase of their research, both as a result of the NSF’s requirement that data-management plans be included in new funding proposals. Only one project had a systematic plan for depositing its ethnographic data in an archives, principally because this research was conducted as part of a very large and well-funded research initiative. This project had amassed some 40,000 pages of ethnographic fieldnotes, which were being preserved but not yet been shared publically. The researcher leading this project explained:\r\n\r\nIt’s news to anthropologists that data should be made public. It’s not something that’s in their mindset. In fact they are appalled by it. . . . However, that [ethnographic] data was paid for using a million dollars of federal money and I’m using it with some of my grad students who are essentially doing secondary analysis of fieldnotes. I think that in the long run that data should be made public, and could be, but very carefully. . . . I don’t think that’s a problem . . . my guess is we’re going to get there. . . . A very new area now is “what do you do with electronic fieldnotes?” and “can those be made available for researchers?” If nothing else, I think this archive of fieldnotes . . .in 20 or 30 years could be a great historical source and should be preserved on that basis. So, I would like to see us work out ways of carefully having anthropological and ethnographic data made public too. (5-11-103011)\r\n\r\nIn working out the procedures for sharing these materials, this researcher went on to emphasize the paramount importance of protecting research participants’ confidentiality. Indeed, all of the ethnographers cited confidentiality concerns as one of the foremost issues that they would need to discuss and resolve with an archivist or repository manager before depositing their materials, making it perhaps the most critical area for developing collaborative practices between researchers, data curators, and archivists.\r\n\r\n<b>The Confidentiality Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nThe ethics statements of both the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association require researchers to protect the confidentiality of their respondents (although the AAA statement asserts that expectations of credit should also be addressed). ((ASA, Code of Ethics, 11; AAA, Statement on Ethics (Part 3), 7.)) Protecting research participants’ confidentiality is routinely an explicit promise within social science research, and is an almost universally assumed requirement of IRBs when reviewing research proposals. Setting aside the research participant’s potential moral right to authorship as discussed above, the nature of ethnographic research often renders the promise of confidentiality problematic, if not outright impossible. As Zachary Schrag observes, maintaining the confidentiality of fieldwork sites and research participants discussed in publications has been a perennial problem for social science researchers, as details necessary to make ethnographic and other fieldwork-based writing meaningful often simultaneously make these places and people identifiable, especially to people familiar with the location or topic. ((Zachary M. Schrag, <i>Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 15.)) Increasing confidentiality protections almost always come at the cost of decreasing the amount of contextual information included for the ethnography’s audience, and can effectively prevent data from being deposited in an archives or repository (or sometimes even collected). A sociologist recounted the difficulties he encountered on one project:\r\n\r\nI wanted to do life histories with priests [in central Pennsylvania], and part of the problem was . . . we got into a situation where people might tell me things about their personal lives that are sort of not confidential in the IRB sense but that might be upsetting to their congregations—like I talked to one priest who had been married three times, where if the congregation had known about that they would have been very upset. There’s nothing illegal about it; this person’s not shy about telling that, but it could have been damaging. But I had the sense that . . . if I went around and did these interviews, I didn’t want to destroy the data because I thought they had some historical importance. . . . [The IRB said,] “and when you get done with this study if you’re not going to destroy the data you have to store it in an archive for 50 years, and I checked with [university] archives and they said, “we’re not going to store anything like that.” . . . I wanted to preserve the data, but there was no way to do it. . . . I actually quit the project [because the IRB made it impossible to do]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nWhile protecting research participants’ privacy can be difficult, even in carefully prepared and edited publications, the nature of ethnographic materials makes them especially difficult to confidentially preserve over time. Audio and video recordings present obvious confidentiality problems by capturing a respondents’ voice or image, ((For a discussion of the extreme difficulty of archiving video and audio data anonymously, see Louise Corti, Annette Day, and Gill Backhouse, “Confidentiality and Informed Consent: Issues for Consideration in the Preservation of and Provision of Access to Qualitative Data Archives,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 4.4c, <a href=\"http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024\">http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024</a>.)) but even interview transcripts can be problematic. A common practice in archiving ethnographic materials is to make attempts to remove potentially identifying information from archived transcripts. However, even these “anonymized” transcripts often still contain personal details that allow the possible identification of research participants. For example, in the interviews conducted for this study, participants regularly discussed their discipline and research interests. Coupled with the names of the universities where the research was conducted—which are contained in all of our research proposals and publications—this seemingly innocuous information would probably render any of our participants identifiable with a simple web search if the full interview transcripts were released. This might not seem like a significant risk for scholars describing projects that they routinely discuss publically, but depending on the other details contained in the transcript it might also be embarrassing or potentially damaging (for example, comments about university administrators, other colleagues, etc.). As is often the case with qualitative research, removing these contextual details would diminish, if not destroy, the usefulness of these data to future researchers—the ostensible audience for these materials. Unfortunately, each piece of contextual detail retained about a research participant to aid in data interpretation simultaneously creates more potential for identification.\r\n\r\nGiven technological advances, removing all conceivably identifying details might still be insufficient to guarantee that transcripts are rendered anonymous. In fact, anonymizing transcripts may soon no longer be technically possible. Arvind Narayana and his colleagues have demonstrated that it is possible to accurately identify anonymous online authors up to 20 percent of the time based on writing style alone, given a sufficient corpus of example texts. ((A. Narayanan, H. Paskov, N. Z. Gong, J. Bethencourt, E. Stefanov, E. C. R. Shin, and D. Song, “On the Feasibility of Internet-scale Author Identification,” Security and Privacy (SP), 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 20-23, 2012): 301, <a href=\"http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420\">http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420</a>.)) As more and more content moves online, one can only assume that these techniques will become more robust, so that identifying a participant from the vocabulary or speech patterns in a transcript may eventually become a matter of applying the correct software. These realities set up even the most well-intentioned researchers to fail to meet the obligations required by IRBs and the agreements made with their respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen archiving ethnographic materials, confidentiality can also be equally important for protecting the researcher. This is especially true for the archiving of fieldnotes, which are profoundly personal for many ethnographic researchers. Researchers are often quite ambivalent about these data, regularly describing feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, or embarrassment about their work and what it reveals about them as scholars. ((Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” 10-12.)) When talking about her data collection process, an anthropologist in our study observed:\r\n\r\nThat’s the thing with fieldnotes, you never show them to anyone . . . as long as it works for you . . . it’s not like you have to show it to someone else and have them make sense of it, which is kind of a shame because it would be nice to have data in formats where people could, you know, sort of, archive that information. (2-16-120211)\r\n\r\nIn his study of fieldnote practices, Jean Jackson observes, “Many respondents point out that the highly personal nature of fieldnotes influences the extent of one’s willingness to share them: ‘Fieldnotes can reveal how worthless your work was, the lacunae, your linguistic incompetence, your not being made a blood brother, your childish temper.’” ((Ibid., 22.)) Anthropologist Simon Ottenberg describes his fieldnotes similarly, “[W]hen I was younger, I would have felt uncomfortable at the thought of someone else using my notes, whether I was alive or dead—they are so much a private thing, so much an aspect of personal field experience, so much a private language, so much part of my ego, my childhood [as an anthropologist], and my personal maturity.” ((Simon Ottenberg, “Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1990), 153.)) This attachment and ambivalence may make researchers reluctant to turn over control of their notes to an archives—especially one that has the purpose of making materials available publically on the internet. This professional practice not only makes it very difficult to substantiate or verify ethnographers’ data, suggesting a need for ethnographers to develop more proactive and sensitive data-sharing procedures, but also creates a situation where ethnographic materials are saved, but with inadequate plans for preservation. Zeitlyn notes, “Paradoxically most anthropologists want neither to destroy their field material nor archive it.” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.)) So, too, with our study: almost no one had made plans for their data beyond the short term, let alone the final dispensation of their materials at the end of their career or after their death.\r\n\r\nWhile archivists regularly assure scholars that the papers of “ordinary” or not-famous researchers are sometimes the most valuable, ((Catherine Fowler, \"Ethical Considerations,\" in Silverman and Parezo, <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, 64-65; Robert Leopold, “The Second Life of Ethnographic Fieldnotes,” <i>Ateliers d\'anthropologie</i> 32 (2008): 4.)) researchers themselves are often unconvinced. Many of our respondents had trouble imagining the potential audience for their data and primary materials, although one Environmental Studies researcher shared data on graffiti images she collected during fieldwork following a particular ethnic conflict event. The data were not directly related to her primary research questions, but another scholar used them in a Master’s thesis (and possibly in a future dissertation). Nevertheless, doubts about future usefulness contribute to researchers’ reluctance to undertake sometimes arduous and time-consuming data preservation and annotation tasks, such as redacting confidential information, and to neglect advance planning for the eventual archiving of their materials, such as assuring adequate consent procedures. This is potentially a key area of advocacy for data curators and archivists, who are well positioned to both educate researchers in the importance of preserving primary data for future generations of researchers, even if its immediate value is not apparent, and to provide tools such as cross-indexes and finding aids that make these data more useful and comparable. ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 301-305. See also Louise Corti, “Progress and Problems of Preserving and Providing Access to Qualitative Data for Social Research—The International Picture of an Emerging Culture,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 10.1.))\r\n\r\n<b>The Consent Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nBoth IRBs and disciplinary societies’ ethics statements emphasize the importance and necessity of obtaining informed consent from research participants. Given the possibility of archiving materials indefinitely, and especially for web publication, obtaining fully informed consent may be a futile endeavor. Libby Bishop points out that because researchers cannot adequately speculate on all the uses in which data might be employed, explicit consent is “logically impossible.” ((Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.)) However, Bishop also observes that this should not paralyze researchers from depositing their materials in archives, since consent for the primary research activity is in itself partial and no researcher can fully explain all information about any research project. ((Ibid., 264.)) Zeitlyn makes this point in another way, noting that cultural differences may also limit the ability of a researcher to obtain consent in a way that is recognizable to IRBs: “Once material is archived, it may be consulted by unknown others who might use it in novel ways. . . . Can a researcher obtain meaningful prior informed consent if the uses to which the material might be put in the future cannot be explained?” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471; see also Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 147.))\r\n\r\nWhile Bishop suggests responding to this problem by providing examples of how archived research might be reused or by obtaining open-ended consent, ((Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.)) others suggest a more comprehensive approach that understands consent as a process rather than a one-time event. ((Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 146; AAA, Code of Ethics, III.A.4.)) This approach presents significant difficulties when applied to the lifecycle of an entire ethnographic research project, especially once data and other fieldwork materials are deposited in an archives for the purpose of long-term access and preservation. If appropriate consent for archiving is not obtained at the outset of a project, or is sought when new uses are discovered for materials, contacting participants to authorize this usage can be extremely difficult and costly for ethnographers, if not outright impossible. Furthermore, a consent model that requires re-contacting participants also requires confidentiality or anonymization procedures to be reversible, meaning that the researcher must retain records that can link individuals to the materials about them. Retaining contact information or other identifying records is not best practice for assuring participant confidentiality, and in the case of truly sensitive research, doing so unnecessarily maintains records that could be subject to subpoena or otherwise compromised. For example, in 2012 the US Department of Justice issued a subpoena in connection with a murder investigation on behalf of Great Britain for access to oral history interviews conducted with Irish Republican Army and Loyalist paramilitary members as part of “The Belfast Project,” archived at Boston College’s Burns Library. While the project’s confidentiality agreement promised interviewees that these materials would be embargoed until their death, this guarantee was subject to exceptions required by American law; a point that may have been unclear to the research participants. Both Boston College and the researchers are presently contesting the subpoenas, but the initial rulings by a federal district court and the First Circuit Court of Appeals have found that the subpoenas are legal. ((The Society of American Archivists Oral History Section maintains a webpage summarizing the case and providing links to relevant documents at <a href=\"http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members\">http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members</a>.)) As this case demonstrates, whenever identifying information exists, there is a possibility that its disclosure can be compelled. From the point of view of research-participant confidentiality, it is therefore preferable to destroy materials that enable identification or re-contact as soon as possible after research is complete.\r\n\r\nSince anonymization is an all-or-nothing decision that must be irreversible, even for the researcher, if it is to be effective, ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.)) in order to make consent an ongoing process, one must also accept that the data cannot be made fully anonymous. The question then becomes how researchers can meaningfully extend consent decisions to include archives without rendering them unmanageable for their administrators or unnecessarily diminishing their analytical value. ((See Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294-95.)) Balancing the need to maintain appropriate levels of confidentiality with the administrative costs is a critical area for collaboration between researchers, archivists, and data specialists. Fully anonymizing datasets is probably neither necessary, nor cost effective, for relatively low-risk materials, ((See Corti, Day, and Backhouse,\" Confidentiality and Informed Consent,\" 4.4, on the expense of creating anonymized archives.)) but both the researcher and the archivists must fully understand the potential risk scenarios before these decisions can be made, particularly in an environment where privacy protections are an increasing concern for research participants. While discussing the challenges he faces in complying with funder’s public access requirements, a sociologist observed:\r\n\r\nClearly the biggest problem is the problem of protection of privacy. The concern of privacy has been ramped up tremendously over the last 10 or 15 years, and the process of getting permission to analyze data can be difficult, but a trend in social science data is to include more and more information that\'s sensitive. . . . I think the field is trying to now establish appropriate levels of protection for particular kinds of data and is trying to balance this problem of privacy with public access. And it is a challenge and it’s going to require some new modes of doing things. (5-11-103111)\r\n\r\nDeveloping these modes of work and processes of consent requires not only the participation of researchers and scholarly societies, but also intensive cooperation with data management specialists, technologists, and archivists. ((ICPSR’s “Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving Phase 5: Preparing Data for Sharing” provides a model for these processes. See <a href=\"http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html\">http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html</a>.))\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusions and Recommendations</b>\r\n\r\nResearchers and archivists alike face tremendous challenges in effectively preserving ethnographic research data and providing meaningful access for researchers and other stakeholders while simultaneously protecting sensitive data. In order to be effective, data sharing, confidentiality, and consent imperatives all require the active participation and investment of researchers themselves. Decisions about access, issues of authorship attribution, adequate consent, and the level of confidentially required cannot be made without the input of someone who is deeply knowledgeable about the contexts in which the research took place. However, as we have seen, none of these decision processes necessarily end at the moment when the materials are deposited in an archives or repository, and a researcher’s ethical obligation to his or her research participants does not end once he or she has transferred responsibility for their preservation. This sense of responsibility makes many researchers reluctant to relinquish control over their ethnographic materials, lest changing political, social, or cultural conditions necessitates a more restrictive approach to data access than was initially required.\r\n\r\nFor example, an Environmental Studies researcher noted that currently her data does not present much risk to her respondents:\r\n\r\nMost of the data I’ve collected really have limited privacy issues or any kind of harm that could come to respondents. There are some topics that I’ve looked at, that depending on, when—you know, timeliness—at what point these were published, that identifying information could be problematic. In [central Asian country] it’s a lot easier—at least currently—the situation for my topics isn’t dangerous. That doesn’t mean it can’t be in the future and if I extended the research to neighboring countries then I would probably have some more serious confidentiality issues. (2-12-111011)\r\n\r\nIf the political situation for her respondents changed, however, this researcher might be ethically obligated to change the access conditions of any materials that she had archived, even if her consent procedures had addressed this eventuality. Repositories for ethnographic materials must be careful to include procedures to respond to these types of situations in their donor agreements, and researchers should discuss the unique qualities of ethnographic materials prior to their deposit. As Parezo points out, “it is unethical and unreasonable to expect the archival community to guess which fieldnotes contain sensitive information and what are reasonable use restrictions.” ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 285.))\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, preparing materials for deposit into an archives is often a low priority for ethnographers for a variety of reasons, and the archiving of ethnographic data is further hindered by a persistent lack of training. While comprehensive historical review is beyond the scope of this article, Silverman already noted the problem of a lack of formal training in data collection and management practices among anthropologists almost 20 years ago, ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 6.)) before the rise of many of the complications that the expansion of digital data collection created. Almost none of the scholars we interviewed reported that data curation or stewardship training was part of their graduate curriculum, and data management was usually only addressed narrowly in relation to methodological approaches and problems. The ethical and practical difficulties involved in managing and preserving large amounts of research data were rarely addressed, with most researchers acquiring the skills they needed via trial and error. ((Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) None of the scholars interviewed during this study expressed satisfaction with their level of expertise in data management, and few had access to individuals who could provide knowledgeable guidance. While it would be preferable for graduate curricula to include this type of training, it seems unlikely that this change will occur in the near term. It is, therefore, likely that archivists and data specialists will need to provide this training, preferably by developing relationships with ethnographic researchers as early as possible in the research process.\r\n\r\nThe lack of confidence in their data-management training compounds researchers’ apprehension about the ethical issues contained in their data. Researchers are naturally—and rightfully—conservative about the potential risks in sharing data, especially if they are not convinced they can protect their respondents’ confidentiality, or that they have obtained appropriate consent—issues that the difficulties of cross-cultural communication make more complex. Without such assurances that these ethical imperatives can be addressed, many researchers are unlikely to invest in archiving their materials. “In many cases, their desire to avoid the ethical risks of inappropriate data release may outweigh the costs of potential data loss.” ((Ibid., 17.))\r\n\r\nBecause of these interrelated concerns, it is critical that the archival and data curation systems available to ethnographic researchers have multiple and fine-grained levels of access and privacy controls. Tools must be developed that can appropriately manage confidential data and that allow researchers, working in conjunction with their respondents, to exercise control over their data, administer who has access to it, and account for culturally specific restrictions on data use. ((Ibid., 17-18.)) One example of a system attempting to address these requirements is the Murkutu content management system (<a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/\">http://www.mukurtu.org/</a>), which makes cultural protocols a fundamental part of access to materials. This allows for the easy creation of fine-grained and culturally appropriate user groups with specifically defined usage rights, and it is being developed in cooperation with indigenous communities. ((A list of community groups and organizations participating in the Mukurtu project is available at <a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html\">http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html</a>.))\r\n\r\nBecause the nature of ethnographic materials makes them potentially subject to ongoing and evolving dilemmas of confidentiality and consent, archivists and data managers should understand that these materials may require ongoing curation, preferably through processes and procedures that incorporate researchers in a collaborative and meaningful way. Although many researchers would welcome the ability to more easily share their data, particularly in collaborative projects and in response to data-sharing requirements, they are almost universally resistant to any arrangement in which they would relinquish control over access to the data. As one anthropologist described:\r\n\r\nPeople don’t hesitate, at all, to share data with collaborators that they trust. … If you provide a mechanism for collaboration, even if it’s just Google Docs or something, you know, people share data easily and freely. It’s when it becomes an anonymous process that they seem to get balky. (1-02-100511)\r\n\r\nThe goal of making materials publically available online, then, will require archival systems and processes that are cognizant of the complex social relationships embedded within ethnographic materials, not only between the researcher and his or her respondents, but also between and among the many stakeholders in ethnographic data. The development of additional policies, ethical guidelines, and best practices by disciplinary organizations, funding agencies, universities, and cultural institutions could further aid researchers and archivists in navigating the ethical dilemmas contained in the archival process.\r\n\r\nBecause much ethnographic data is collected by individuals in relatively small and often idiosyncratic datasets, it is especially vulnerable to loss due to benign neglect or lack or resources, even if the data are historically unique. A sociologist described one such vulnerable dataset:\r\n\r\nWe did life histories of 45 people in a [church] congregation in [central Pennsylvania town]. . . . It’s probably the only body of material on a single congregation of that depth and complexity that exists, and I’m just too lazy to have figured out what to do with it and write it up and everything, but you could imagine somewhere somebody who wants to do research on congregations would find this incredibly valuable. But what’s going to happen to it [in the long term]? And what’s going to happen to it is, the copies I have will end up in a trash can, and my computer hard drive will eventually crash or get outmoded or get erased, and that’ll be the end of it [if there isn’t a place to archive it]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nIn order to prevent these losses, data management specialists and archivists must specifically curate these materials. They must also build relationships with ethnographers to resolve the unique ethical dilemmas these data present and the uneasy tensions between researchers’ desire to share data publically and obligations to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study.\r\n\r\nFinally, despite the acknowledged importance and value of archival materials to the disciplines and future researchers, academic rewards systems offer very little payoff for the work that goes into making ethnographic materials available, and ethnographic researchers are often under-resourced in the funding, time, and personnel support needed for preparing materials for archiving. ((The NSF’s recent decision to list datasets as one of the research products to be included in the section of its grant proposals where researchers describe their qualifications does suggest, however, that the current rewards system may gradually be changing (see <a href=\"http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp\">http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp</a>).)) Archivists must therefore work to make archival systems and the development of archival processes and policies as straightforward for researchers as possible, ideally assisting in integrating the development of metadata and other secondary materials (for example, codebooks, explanatory materials, finding aids, and ontologies) necessary to archiving and ensuring the long-term usefulness of primary data as early in the research process as possible. Likewise, funding agencies should improve funding for long-term data management, preservation, and curatorial services, either directly or via guidelines to institutions for recouping indirect costs, especially when the grant mandates archiving or public data accessibility. By providing these supports, archivists and funders would greatly assist researchers in responding to the imperatives of providing access to data and assuring the confidentiality and consent of their respondents, as well as resolving the ethical dilemmas contained in their data, thereby helping assure the preservation of irreplaceable ethnographic information.','Curating the Ethnographic Moment','','inherit','open','open','','4698-revision-15','','','2013-06-17 23:52:26','2013-06-17 23:52:26','',4698,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4698-revision-15/',0,'revision','',0),(4717,3,'2013-06-17 23:46:13','2013-06-17 23:46:13','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nBy vastly increasing the volume and types of data that field researchers can collect, digital technologies have reshaped ethnographers’ relationship with their accumulated research data and materials. Whereas paper-based fieldnotes and other physical ethnographic records are often deposited in repositories and made accessible only after a scholar’s death, the emergence of born-digital materials has created and enhanced possibilities for rapidly sharing data, not only with other researchers but also with research subjects and the public at large via online repositories. While many researchers support the principal of public access to research data, making this data available online can compound the ethical dilemmas ethnographers face. Ethnographers often find themselves torn between contradictory imperatives to share data publically and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study. ((L. Jahnke, A. Asher, and S.D.C. Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>, CLIR Publication #154 (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2012).))\r\n\r\nUnlike experimental data, ethnographic data, by definition, are not reproducible. ((See Sydel Silverman, “Introduction,” in <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, ed. Sydel Silverman and Nancy J. Parezo (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1995), 1.)) Ethnographic fieldwork is inextricably linked to a particular time, place, and society, making the primary data of ethnographers unique and unrecoverable. For this reason, today’s ethnographic fieldnotes are particularly important to preserve as tomorrow’s historical records; they document observations of places and cultures that—because they are in a constant state of change—will never exist in the same configuration again. Since ethnographic fieldnotes provide the empirical basis for researchers’ public authority, it would likewise seem logical for fieldnotes and other ethnographic materials to be made available for verification purposes in online repositories as soon as possible after the publication of research reports, articles, or monographs.\r\n\r\nHowever, several characteristics of ethnographic materials cause them to be particularly difficult to make publically accessible. First, many ethnographic researchers are reluctant to share their data for personal reasons. Ethnographic fieldnotes are intensely personal documents for many researchers, who often view them as extremely valuable for their own work, but doubt that they would be useful to other researchers without the accompanying contexts and experiences in which the materials were collected. Secondly, ethnographic materials also routinely contain private, confidential, or culturally sensitive information about both research subjects and the researcher, which often requires time-consuming or costly procedures to redact, and may limit or prevent public dissemination and secondary analyses of the data. Finally, ethnographic materials are regularly collected in contexts with varying or conflicting cultural standards for consent and data use, raising ethical questions about the efficacy of archiving these materials. For these reasons, balancing the multiple imperatives of data sharing, informed consent, and confidentiality for research participants is a fundamental issue for ethnographers preparing to deposit their materials in an archives, and the ethics surrounding these decisions was one of the most common and recurring themes in the interviews conducted for the study we present here.\r\n\r\nUsing data gathered during the 2011-2012 academic year in a qualitative study of researchers’ data management and curation practices, ((This study was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and managed by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). See Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) this article examines the practical and ethical dilemmas ethnographers face as they work with diverse research materials across varying, and sometimes conflicting, cultural standards for consent and data use. By emphasizing the everyday practices of researchers, this study sought to gain a holistic understanding of the workflows involved in the creation, management, and preservation of research data in order to better comprehend researchers’ unmet needs within data curation processes. Twenty-three researchers from varying ranks working in a variety of social science disciplines at five universities ((Penn State University, Lehigh University, Bucknell University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Pennsylvania.)) participated in interviews for this study (see Table 1), which focused on how researchers collect and analyze data, how they manage and preserve these data, and what training they have had in data-curation practices.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4704\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"273\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4704\" alt=\"Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants.  *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE-273x300.jpg\" width=\"273\" height=\"300\" /></a> Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants. *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.[/caption]\r\n\r\nAlthough scholars across many disciplines were grappling with the ethical and philosophical problems of data sharing—often in the absence of coherent policies for data archiving and release from funding agencies, professional organizations, or their employing institutions—this article will focus on the experiences of nine of these researchers who conducted ethnography as part of their data collection. Because ethnographic research involves a complex social interplay between researchers and respondents, often from differing cultural contexts, the management of these data presents unique difficulties for researchers who usually have little or no training in preservation, curation, or data-stewardship strategies. This article will examine how researchers navigate these difficulties when dealing with the two principal types of ethnographic data: fieldnotes—the diverse array of notes, writings, and other materials upon which researchers base their ethnographies ((Jean E. Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1.))—and the research artifacts, such as transcripts and audio or video recordings, produced from more formal, direct interactions with respondents.\r\n\r\n<b>The Data Sharing Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nFunding agencies—especially agencies administering public funds—are increasingly requiring qualitative research data to be made publically available. Since 1995, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)—a major source of funding for qualitative research in the United Kingdom—has required its awardees to archive their data as a condition of funding. ((See O. Parry and N. S. Mauthner, “Whose Data Are They Anyway?” <i>Sociology</i> 38, no. 1 (2004): 140-41.)) Similarly, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other US funding agencies (e.g. National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities) have begun to require formal data-management plans detailing how researchers will meet data-sharing expectations. Our assumption is that this trend will continue as both public and private funders seek maximum returns on their investment in research. While not always explicitly required, the goal of many of these policies is for research data to be deposited in an appropriate repository with online access for both other researchers and the public. For ethnographers, who are often accustomed to retaining exclusive rights over their fieldnotes and other materials, this can represent an uncomfortable shift in research practice, even when these repositories take into account the particular confidentiality and consent demands inherent to ethnographic research (discussed further below) and implement appropriate safeguards such as embargoing or redacting sensitive materials.\r\n\r\nIn principal, the ethnographic researchers we interviewed for this study saw data preservation and sharing as positive values, even if they were not sure about how to preserve and share data or who would potentially use the materials. When asked about what parts of her research data she would like to preserve, one anthropologist explained:\r\n\r\nThat’s the thing—If you keep anything long enough it becomes interesting. . . . For myself . . . I would love to archive everything and maybe put some kind of time stamp on personal information where it can’t be released for some amount of time. It’s so hard to know what people in the future would be interested in. . . . I try to keep data in such a way that hopefully it would be comprehensible to someone else if they were willing to work through my crazy software. . . . If I had somebody’s fieldnotes from 100 years ago from my field site, I’d be totally fascinated by that, so you never know what people are going to be interested in. (2-16-120211) ((The number in parentheses is the participant identification number; please refer to Table 1.))\r\n\r\nThe scholarly societies to which many of these researchers belong also broadly support data sharing and potential reuse. The most recent 2012 revision on the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) ethics statement explicitly states that it is the obligation of the researcher to preserve records and make results accessible, “Anthropologists have an ethical responsibility for ensuring the integrity, preservation, and protection of their work” and, the “results of anthropological research should be disseminated in a timely fashion” provided it is not “at the expense of protecting confidentiality.” ((American Anthropological Association (AAA), <i>Statement on Ethics: Principals of Professional Responsibility</i>, 2012, <a href=\"http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf\">http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf</a>.)) The previous 1998 version also addressed data access and preservation, but not as systematically or forcefully. ((This version was slightly revised in 2009 to make minor changes to some of the statement’s language. Since this revision did not alter the structure or main points of the statement, we continue to refer the 1998 version (as does the AAA’s ethics website). American Anthropological Association, Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, Statement, 1998, B.4-5, C1.)) Likewise, the American Sociological Association sets similar expectations in the data sharing section of its Code of Ethics. ((American Sociological Association, Code of Ethics, 1999, 13.05.))\r\n\r\nThe benefits of data archiving and sharing for scholarly disciplines and the advancement of knowledge are straightforward: preserved materials can be subjected to secondary analysis, unnecessary duplication of research can be minimized, historical records can be maintained, and, importantly, scholars can independently evaluate the validity of published results by consulting the primary data. ((Libby Bishop, “Ethical Sharing and Reuse of Qualitative Data,” <i>Australian Journal of Social Issues</i> 44, no. 3 (2009): 266.)) Furthermore, online repositories might enable new forms of scholarship and writing. For the first time, materials preserved and made accessible online have made it feasible to make publically available the corpus of primary texts that form the basis of support for ethnographic argumentation. While a non-digitized, paper-based collection could also serve this purpose, it is unlikely that more than a handful of interested readers of a particular ethnography would physically travel to the repository to examine the documents. Repositories that make resources available online fundamentally change this dynamic. In <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive, </i>Johannes Fabian explores these possibilities by conducting what he describes as an experiment with “writing ethnography ‘in the presence of texts’” located in a publically accessible online repository. ((Johannes Fabian, <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive</i> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), vii.)) Fabian terms this genre of writing “commentary,” a text-centered form of ethnography that assumes his reader can simultaneously consult a primary text for her or himself via an online archive. ((Ibid., 9-13.))\r\n\r\nThe text Fabian utilizes is a conversation he and Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel had about a ceremony Kahenga conducted at Fabian’s home in Zaire in 1974. ((Ibid., 3.)) The transcription, translation, and an audio excerpt of the discussion are now housed in the Archives of Popular Swahili on the website of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa project. ((Johannes. Fabian, “‘Magic and Modernity’: A Conversation with a Herbalist and Practitioner of Magic,” trans. Johannes Fabian, <i>Archives of Popular Swahili</i> 7 (2005), <a href=\"http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction\">http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction</a>.)) Fabian argues that the repository of documents serves an important epistemological purpose by “mediat[ing] between . . . events, the presentation of evidence, and our aims and claims to produce anthropological knowledge.” ((Fabian, “Magic,” 123.)) By allowing the reader of an ethnography to interrogate and evaluate the primary data on which it is based, the archive reveals how ethnographies are composed through the confrontation between the researcher, his or her respondents, and the texts they co-create. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography</i>, 54. One does wonder, however, why Fabian considered a traditionally published monograph necessary to this project, rather than simply including it in the archive. Given that his book annotates the online texts using paragraph numbers that assume a specific online layout, it would seem more effective to have created hyperlinks between the commentary and the primary materials. In this way, the “experiment” seems incomplete.))\r\n\r\nFabian’s instructive experiment notwithstanding, for many researchers the practice of making ethnographic materials available online is fraught. Ethnography requires researchers to occupy a methodological position that mediates and translates between multiple cultural contexts. This positioning leads to a number of difficulties for ethnographers as they attempt to meet their obligations to multiple constituencies—including funders, cultural institutions, and the researcher’s employing university, in addition to the individuals and communities the researcher works with—while negotiating the processes of placing materials in archives and repositories. When working with human subjects, ethical pitfalls abound, and often ethnographers must resolve contradictions between these groups.\r\n\r\nAt a very basic level, policies requiring access to research data may “directly [contradict] some ethnic groups’ cultural traditions concerning secrecy and controlled access to information.” ((David Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates,” <i>Annual Review of Anthropology</i> 41, no. 1 (2012): 472, doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721. See also G. Isaac, “Whose Idea Was This?: Museums, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge,” <i>Current Anthropology</i> 52, no. 2 (2011) 211-233.)) For example, an anthropologist might gain access to knowledge that is secret, or restricted for cultural or social reasons. During his fieldwork with the Saramaka, a group in Suriname who descended from escaped African slaves, Richard Price gained knowledge about the “Old-Time People” who experienced the war for liberation from roughly 1680 to 1762. ((Richard Price, <i>First Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 5-6. For additional examples and a discussion of cross-cultural differences in relation to access to knowledge see Nancy J. Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage: CoPAR, Anthropological Records, and the Archival Community,” <i>The American Archivist </i>62 (1999): 285, note 24.)) The Saramaka consider knowledge about this time and these people powerful, dangerous, and restricted. Price struggled with the ethical implications of publishing a book within a different cultural system that uses this knowledge as its primary subject. ((Price, <i>First Time, </i>21-23.)) Price notes that by putting the information in a public document, he potentially “deprives [the] author of control (except perhaps via the language in which [the book] appears) over [his or her] audience.” ((Ibid., 23.)) This problem is compounded exponentially once information is made available online (as Price’s book now is, at least in part, in Google Books) by removing even the physical restrictions of a bound monograph.\r\n\r\nInformation need not be “exotic” to create publishing difficulties for ethnographers. For example, an ethnographer working in a corporate, government, or other institutional setting in the United States might be privy to proprietary or confidential information about a product or service that must be ethically and legally protected. A researcher in environmental engineering explained her process when conducting interviews:\r\n\r\nAnother big concern is confidentiality because I record those conversations, and then there’s kind of an extended period of time in which I allow those who I’ve talked with to redact parts of our conversation if they’ve talked about things they would prefer to remain private. . . I’m talking to several companies about the development and production of their technologies and so there’s some proprietary information that comes up and that’s really the main concern. (5-20-020212)\r\n\r\nIndeed, accidental release of this type of information might put the researcher at as much legal risk as her respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen preparing to preserve ethnographic data, issues of ownership and authorship are also not always straightforward, and it is imperative that researchers communicate and address these potential problems with archivists, data curators, and repository and digital collection managers before depositing ethnographic materials. For example, consent forms for interviews might not clearly state who holds the copyright or who has a license to use the recording or transcripts, potentially leading to confusion over the legal status of these materials and making it more difficult for a researcher to transfer materials to an archives. Intellectual property and copyright are themselves culturally specific concepts, and a legal right to dispose of or deposit materials as a researcher sees fit does not equal an ethical right to do so. The people providing information, the funders, the institution that employs the researcher, and the community in which the researcher works all have a moral interest in the disposition of the data. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 142.)) Parry and Mauthner go so far as to say, “[B]ecause the construction of qualitative data is a joint endeavor between respondent and researcher, both parties should retain authorship/ownership rights over the data,” which creates “practical, legal and ethical implications for archiving and re-use.” ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 141.))\r\n\r\nSome researchers, including Fabian, argue that since ethnographers and their respondents are joint agents in creating ethnographic materials, both parties should be named to acknowledge their contributions. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) However, naming respondents as authors or contributors contradicts an ethnographer’s imperative to protect the confidentiality of their research participants, which is a basic standard required by most Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved research and by professional-ethics statements. While David Zeitlyn observes that “a default assumption that notes will be anonymized conflicts with an individual’s moral right to be recognized as the author of his or her words,” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 470.)) many, if not most, ethnographers would likely be uncomfortable naming their participants in almost any context, but especially in publically accessible online repositories. This is likely to hold true even if a researcher philosophically accepts that his or her authority to determine the level of sensitivity that the data require privileges the researcher’s position vis-à-vis his or her respondents. ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 148.))\r\n\r\nMany ethnographers thus understand themselves not so much as owners of their data, but rather as stewards or custodians of data that are produced by a complex set of relationships between researchers and respondents. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4-5.)) As the stewards of these data, researchers are often the de facto interpreters of the terms by which data are made available, choosing what and when to publish or deposit materials in repositories or archives. Despite his assertion that correspondents should be named, Fabian notes that he exercises this stewardship by attempting not to publish anything that might be dangerous or damaging to the people with whom he worked—a position that is probably made easier by the fact that the texts he is working with were already 30 years old when he transcribed and posted them on the web. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) Many researchers we interviewed adopted a similar “attitude of moral responsibility towards research participants, expressed in the way in which data are handled,” ((Annamaria Carusi and Marina Jirotka, “From Data Archive to Ethical Labyrinth,” <i>Qualitative Research</i> 9, no. 3 (2009): 292.)) citing ethical concerns about appropriate use of the data as well as issues of confidentiality and consent. Even for researchers who support public access to data, these concerns cause them to question funders’ data-sharing requirements. A researcher in education who was preparing to apply for additional funding to create a longitudinal dataset by re-interviewing her previous respondents noted her uncertainty:\r\n\r\nI know that a lot of places when you apply for funding they want eventually for [data] to become public. I haven’t had to deal with it, but I’ve definitely thought about it. . . . I want to make sure to preserve the qualitative data because it’s very important to me . . . so it’s a concern for me personally to save it. . . . [But] once it’s public, or shared between other people, I would like to get help eventually on making the data itself more confidential because they are just interview transcripts which, you know, there are a lot of [confidentiality] issues with that, and that I would have to [make the data itself more confidential] before I shared it. . . . I don’t know if there are limits to the extent to which I can make it public or not. (1-04-100511)\r\n\r\nIn the context of making their data accessible, these confidentiality and consent negotiations are some of the most difficult issues for scholars to resolve before depositing their ethnographic materials in data repositories or archives. These issues are also most effectively addressed as early in a research project as possible, so that researchers can implement the necessary practices and protocols to insure that confidentiality and consent can be assured in the long term prior to data collection. As Charles Humphrey and his colleagues discuss, the integral involvement of archivists and data-curation specialists in the planning stages and throughout qualitative research projects greatly increases the quality of the data products and decreases ethical problems associated with deposition in repositories and archives. ((Charles K. Humphrey, Carole A. Estabrooks, Judy R. Norris, Jane E. Smith, and Kathryn L. Hesketh, “Archivist on Board: Contributions to the Research Team,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000).)) As they point out, this collaboration is beneficial to both researchers and archivists, since good archival preparation practices are often synonymous with good research practices. ((Humphrey et al., “Archivist on Board,” 5.))\r\n\r\nDespite efforts by organizations such as the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR) to foster this type of collaboration ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage.”)) and educate ethnographers in data curation and archival preparation practices, ((CoPAR has released a series of fourteen bulletins outlining specific issues involved in the preservation of anthropological materials and addressed to practicing anthropologists. These bulletins are available at <a href=\"http://copar.org/bulletins.htm\">http://copar.org/bulletins.htm</a>. Unfortunately, since most of these bulletins were written in the late 1990s, many of the technology discussions are out of date. However, the conceptual discussions remain highly relevant.)) it appears that relatively few ethnographers seek out the assistance of archivists or data management specialists until after data collection is completed, unless funding requirements compelled them to do so. Of the ethnographers we interviewed, only two had consulted with data management services prior to the data collection phase of their research, both as a result of the NSF’s requirement that data-management plans be included in new funding proposals. Only one project had a systematic plan for depositing its ethnographic data in an archives, principally because this research was conducted as part of a very large and well-funded research initiative. This project had amassed some 40,000 pages of ethnographic fieldnotes, which were being preserved but not yet been shared publically. The researcher leading this project explained:\r\n\r\nIt’s news to anthropologists that data should be made public. It’s not something that’s in their mindset. In fact they are appalled by it. . . . However, that [ethnographic] data was paid for using a million dollars of federal money and I’m using it with some of my grad students who are essentially doing secondary analysis of fieldnotes. I think that in the long run that data should be made public, and could be, but very carefully. . . . I don’t think that’s a problem . . . my guess is we’re going to get there. . . . A very new area now is “what do you do with electronic fieldnotes?” and “can those be made available for researchers?” If nothing else, I think this archive of fieldnotes . . .in 20 or 30 years could be a great historical source and should be preserved on that basis. So, I would like to see us work out ways of carefully having anthropological and ethnographic data made public too. (5-11-103011)\r\n\r\nIn working out the procedures for sharing these materials, this researcher went on to emphasize the paramount importance of protecting research participants’ confidentiality. Indeed, all of the ethnographers cited confidentiality concerns as one of the foremost issues that they would need to discuss and resolve with an archivist or repository manager before depositing their materials, making it perhaps the most critical area for developing collaborative practices between researchers, data curators, and archivists.\r\n\r\n<b>The Confidentiality Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nThe ethics statements of both the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association require researchers to protect the confidentiality of their respondents (although the AAA statement asserts that expectations of credit should also be addressed). ((ASA, Code of Ethics, 11; AAA, Statement on Ethics (Part 3), 7.)) Protecting research participants’ confidentiality is routinely an explicit promise within social science research, and is an almost universally assumed requirement of IRBs when reviewing research proposals. Setting aside the research participant’s potential moral right to authorship as discussed above, the nature of ethnographic research often renders the promise of confidentiality problematic, if not outright impossible. As Zachary Schrag observes, maintaining the confidentiality of fieldwork sites and research participants discussed in publications has been a perennial problem for social science researchers, as details necessary to make ethnographic and other fieldwork-based writing meaningful often simultaneously make these places and people identifiable, especially to people familiar with the location or topic. ((Zachary M. Schrag, <i>Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 15.)) Increasing confidentiality protections almost always come at the cost of decreasing the amount of contextual information included for the ethnography’s audience, and can effectively prevent data from being deposited in an archives or repository (or sometimes even collected). A sociologist recounted the difficulties he encountered on one project:\r\n\r\nI wanted to do life histories with priests [in central Pennsylvania], and part of the problem was . . . we got into a situation where people might tell me things about their personal lives that are sort of not confidential in the IRB sense but that might be upsetting to their congregations—like I talked to one priest who had been married three times, where if the congregation had known about that they would have been very upset. There’s nothing illegal about it; this person’s not shy about telling that, but it could have been damaging. But I had the sense that . . . if I went around and did these interviews, I didn’t want to destroy the data because I thought they had some historical importance. . . . [The IRB said,] “and when you get done with this study if you’re not going to destroy the data you have to store it in an archive for 50 years, and I checked with [university] archives and they said, “we’re not going to store anything like that.” . . . I wanted to preserve the data, but there was no way to do it. . . . I actually quit the project [because the IRB made it impossible to do]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nWhile protecting research participants’ privacy can be difficult, even in carefully prepared and edited publications, the nature of ethnographic materials makes them especially difficult to confidentially preserve over time. Audio and video recordings present obvious confidentiality problems by capturing a respondents’ voice or image, ((For a discussion of the extreme difficulty of archiving video and audio data anonymously, see Louise Corti, Annette Day, and Gill Backhouse, “Confidentiality and Informed Consent: Issues for Consideration in the Preservation of and Provision of Access to Qualitative Data Archives,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 4.4c, <a href=\"http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024\">http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024</a>.)) but even interview transcripts can be problematic. A common practice in archiving ethnographic materials is to make attempts to remove potentially identifying information from archived transcripts. However, even these “anonymized” transcripts often still contain personal details that allow the possible identification of research participants. For example, in the interviews conducted for this study, participants regularly discussed their discipline and research interests. Coupled with the names of the universities where the research was conducted—which are contained in all of our research proposals and publications—this seemingly innocuous information would probably render any of our participants identifiable with a simple web search if the full interview transcripts were released. This might not seem like a significant risk for scholars describing projects that they routinely discuss publically, but depending on the other details contained in the transcript it might also be embarrassing or potentially damaging (for example, comments about university administrators, other colleagues, etc.). As is often the case with qualitative research, removing these contextual details would diminish, if not destroy, the usefulness of these data to future researchers—the ostensible audience for these materials. Unfortunately, each piece of contextual detail retained about a research participant to aid in data interpretation simultaneously creates more potential for identification.\r\n\r\nGiven technological advances, removing all conceivably identifying details might still be insufficient to guarantee that transcripts are rendered anonymous. In fact, anonymizing transcripts may soon no longer be technically possible. Arvind Narayana and his colleagues have demonstrated that it is possible to accurately identify anonymous online authors up to 20 percent of the time based on writing style alone, given a sufficient corpus of example texts. ((A. Narayanan, H. Paskov, N. Z. Gong, J. Bethencourt, E. Stefanov, E. C. R. Shin, and D. Song, “On the Feasibility of Internet-scale Author Identification,” Security and Privacy (SP), 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 20-23, 2012): 301, <a href=\"http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420\">http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420</a>.)) As more and more content moves online, one can only assume that these techniques will become more robust, so that identifying a participant from the vocabulary or speech patterns in a transcript may eventually become a matter of applying the correct software. These realities set up even the most well-intentioned researchers to fail to meet the obligations required by IRBs and the agreements made with their respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen archiving ethnographic materials, confidentiality can also be equally important for protecting the researcher. This is especially true for the archiving of fieldnotes, which are profoundly personal for many ethnographic researchers. Researchers are often quite ambivalent about these data, regularly describing feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, or embarrassment about their work and what it reveals about them as scholars. ((Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” 10-12.)) When talking about her data collection process, an anthropologist in our study observed:\r\n\r\nThat’s the thing with fieldnotes, you never show them to anyone . . . as long as it works for you . . . it’s not like you have to show it to someone else and have them make sense of it, which is kind of a shame because it would be nice to have data in formats where people could, you know, sort of, archive that information. (2-16-120211)\r\n\r\nIn his study of fieldnote practices, Jean Jackson observes, “Many respondents point out that the highly personal nature of fieldnotes influences the extent of one’s willingness to share them: ‘Fieldnotes can reveal how worthless your work was, the lacunae, your linguistic incompetence, your not being made a blood brother, your childish temper.’” ((Ibid., 22.)) Anthropologist Simon Ottenberg describes his fieldnotes similarly, “[W]hen I was younger, I would have felt uncomfortable at the thought of someone else using my notes, whether I was alive or dead—they are so much a private thing, so much an aspect of personal field experience, so much a private language, so much part of my ego, my childhood [as an anthropologist], and my personal maturity.” ((Simon Ottenberg, “Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1990), 153.)) This attachment and ambivalence may make researchers reluctant to turn over control of their notes to an archives—especially one that has the purpose of making materials available publically on the internet. This professional practice not only makes it very difficult to substantiate or verify ethnographers’ data, suggesting a need for ethnographers to develop more proactive and sensitive data-sharing procedures, but also creates a situation where ethnographic materials are saved, but with inadequate plans for preservation. Zeitlyn notes, “Paradoxically most anthropologists want neither to destroy their field material nor archive it.” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.)) So, too, with our study: almost no one had made plans for their data beyond the short term, let alone the final dispensation of their materials at the end of their career or after their death.\r\n\r\nWhile archivists regularly assure scholars that the papers of “ordinary” or not-famous researchers are sometimes the most valuable, ((Catherine Fowler, \"Ethical Considerations,\" in Silverman and Parezo, <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, 64-65; Robert Leopold, “The Second Life of Ethnographic Fieldnotes,” <i>Ateliers d\'anthropologie</i> 32 (2008): 4.)) researchers themselves are often unconvinced. Many of our respondents had trouble imagining the potential audience for their data and primary materials, although one Environmental Studies researcher shared data on graffiti images she collected during fieldwork following a particular ethnic conflict event. The data were not directly related to her primary research questions, but another scholar used them in a Master’s thesis (and possibly in a future dissertation). Nevertheless, doubts about future usefulness contribute to researchers’ reluctance to undertake sometimes arduous and time-consuming data preservation and annotation tasks, such as redacting confidential information, and to neglect advance planning for the eventual archiving of their materials, such as assuring adequate consent procedures. This is potentially a key area of advocacy for data curators and archivists, who are well positioned to both educate researchers in the importance of preserving primary data for future generations of researchers, even if its immediate value is not apparent, and to provide tools such as cross-indexes and finding aids that make these data more useful and comparable. ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 301-305. See also Louise Corti, “Progress and Problems of Preserving and Providing Access to Qualitative Data for Social Research—The International Picture of an Emerging Culture,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 10.1.))\r\n\r\n<b>The Consent Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nBoth IRBs and disciplinary societies’ ethics statements emphasize the importance and necessity of obtaining informed consent from research participants. Given the possibility of archiving materials indefinitely, and especially for web publication, obtaining fully informed consent may be a futile endeavor. Libby Bishop points out that because researchers cannot adequately speculate on all the uses in which data might be employed, explicit consent is “logically impossible.” ((Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.)) However, Bishop also observes that this should not paralyze researchers from depositing their materials in archives, since consent for the primary research activity is in itself partial and no researcher can fully explain all information about any research project. ((Ibid., 264.)) Zeitlyn makes this point in another way, noting that cultural differences may also limit the ability of a researcher to obtain consent in a way that is recognizable to IRBs: “Once material is archived, it may be consulted by unknown others who might use it in novel ways. . . . Can a researcher obtain meaningful prior informed consent if the uses to which the material might be put in the future cannot be explained?” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471; see also Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 147.))\r\n\r\nWhile Bishop suggests responding to this problem by providing examples of how archived research might be reused or by obtaining open-ended consent, ((Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.)) others suggest a more comprehensive approach that understands consent as a process rather than a one-time event.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn48\">[xlviii]</a> This approach presents significant difficulties when applied to the lifecycle of an entire ethnographic research project, especially once data and other fieldwork materials are deposited in an archives for the purpose of long-term access and preservation. If appropriate consent for archiving is not obtained at the outset of a project, or is sought when new uses are discovered for materials, contacting participants to authorize this usage can be extremely difficult and costly for ethnographers, if not outright impossible. Furthermore, a consent model that requires re-contacting participants also requires confidentiality or anonymization procedures to be reversible, meaning that the researcher must retain records that can link individuals to the materials about them. Retaining contact information or other identifying records is not best practice for assuring participant confidentiality, and in the case of truly sensitive research, doing so unnecessarily maintains records that could be subject to subpoena or otherwise compromised. For example, in 2012 the US Department of Justice issued a subpoena in connection with a murder investigation on behalf of Great Britain for access to oral history interviews conducted with Irish Republican Army and Loyalist paramilitary members as part of “The Belfast Project,” archived at Boston College’s Burns Library. While the project’s confidentiality agreement promised interviewees that these materials would be embargoed until their death, this guarantee was subject to exceptions required by American law; a point that may have been unclear to the research participants. Both Boston College and the researchers are presently contesting the subpoenas, but the initial rulings by a federal district court and the First Circuit Court of Appeals have found that the subpoenas are legal.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn49\">[xlix]</a> As this case demonstrates, whenever identifying information exists, there is a possibility that its disclosure can be compelled. From the point of view of research-participant confidentiality, it is therefore preferable to destroy materials that enable identification or re-contact as soon as possible after research is complete.\r\n\r\nSince anonymization is an all-or-nothing decision that must be irreversible, even for the researcher, if it is to be effective,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn50\">[l]</a> in order to make consent an ongoing process, one must also accept that the data cannot be made fully anonymous. The question then becomes how researchers can meaningfully extend consent decisions to include archives without rendering them unmanageable for their administrators or unnecessarily diminishing their analytical value.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn51\">[li]</a> Balancing the need to maintain appropriate levels of confidentiality with the administrative costs is a critical area for collaboration between researchers, archivists, and data specialists. Fully anonymizing datasets is probably neither necessary, nor cost effective, for relatively low-risk materials,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn52\">[lii]</a> but both the researcher and the archivists must fully understand the potential risk scenarios before these decisions can be made, particularly in an environment where privacy protections are an increasing concern for research participants. While discussing the challenges he faces in complying with funder’s public access requirements, a sociologist observed:\r\n\r\nClearly the biggest problem is the problem of protection of privacy. The concern of privacy has been ramped up tremendously over the last 10 or 15 years, and the process of getting permission to analyze data can be difficult, but a trend in social science data is to include more and more information that\'s sensitive. . . . I think the field is trying to now establish appropriate levels of protection for particular kinds of data and is trying to balance this problem of privacy with public access. And it is a challenge and it’s going to require some new modes of doing things. (5-11-103111)\r\n\r\nDeveloping these modes of work and processes of consent requires not only the participation of researchers and scholarly societies, but also intensive cooperation with data management specialists, technologists, and archivists.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn53\">[liii]</a>\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusions and Recommendations</b>\r\n\r\nResearchers and archivists alike face tremendous challenges in effectively preserving ethnographic research data and providing meaningful access for researchers and other stakeholders while simultaneously protecting sensitive data. In order to be effective, data sharing, confidentiality, and consent imperatives all require the active participation and investment of researchers themselves. Decisions about access, issues of authorship attribution, adequate consent, and the level of confidentially required cannot be made without the input of someone who is deeply knowledgeable about the contexts in which the research took place. However, as we have seen, none of these decision processes necessarily end at the moment when the materials are deposited in an archives or repository, and a researcher’s ethical obligation to his or her research participants does not end once he or she has transferred responsibility for their preservation. This sense of responsibility makes many researchers reluctant to relinquish control over their ethnographic materials, lest changing political, social, or cultural conditions necessitates a more restrictive approach to data access than was initially required.\r\n\r\nFor example, an Environmental Studies researcher noted that currently her data does not present much risk to her respondents:\r\n\r\nMost of the data I’ve collected really have limited privacy issues or any kind of harm that could come to respondents. There are some topics that I’ve looked at, that depending on, when—you know, timeliness—at what point these were published, that identifying information could be problematic. In [central Asian country] it’s a lot easier—at least currently—the situation for my topics isn’t dangerous. That doesn’t mean it can’t be in the future and if I extended the research to neighboring countries then I would probably have some more serious confidentiality issues. (2-12-111011)\r\n\r\nIf the political situation for her respondents changed, however, this researcher might be ethically obligated to change the access conditions of any materials that she had archived, even if her consent procedures had addressed this eventuality. Repositories for ethnographic materials must be careful to include procedures to respond to these types of situations in their donor agreements, and researchers should discuss the unique qualities of ethnographic materials prior to their deposit. As Parezo points out, “it is unethical and unreasonable to expect the archival community to guess which fieldnotes contain sensitive information and what are reasonable use restrictions.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn54\">[liv]</a>\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, preparing materials for deposit into an archives is often a low priority for ethnographers for a variety of reasons, and the archiving of ethnographic data is further hindered by a persistent lack of training. While comprehensive historical review is beyond the scope of this article, Silverman already noted the problem of a lack of formal training in data collection and management practices among anthropologists almost 20 years ago,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn55\">[lv]</a> before the rise of many of the complications that the expansion of digital data collection created. Almost none of the scholars we interviewed reported that data curation or stewardship training was part of their graduate curriculum, and data management was usually only addressed narrowly in relation to methodological approaches and problems. The ethical and practical difficulties involved in managing and preserving large amounts of research data were rarely addressed, with most researchers acquiring the skills they needed via trial and error.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn56\">[lvi]</a> None of the scholars interviewed during this study expressed satisfaction with their level of expertise in data management, and few had access to individuals who could provide knowledgeable guidance. While it would be preferable for graduate curricula to include this type of training, it seems unlikely that this change will occur in the near term. It is, therefore, likely that archivists and data specialists will need to provide this training, preferably by developing relationships with ethnographic researchers as early as possible in the research process.\r\n\r\nThe lack of confidence in their data-management training compounds researchers’ apprehension about the ethical issues contained in their data. Researchers are naturally—and rightfully—conservative about the potential risks in sharing data, especially if they are not convinced they can protect their respondents’ confidentiality, or that they have obtained appropriate consent—issues that the difficulties of cross-cultural communication make more complex. Without such assurances that these ethical imperatives can be addressed, many researchers are unlikely to invest in archiving their materials. “In many cases, their desire to avoid the ethical risks of inappropriate data release may outweigh the costs of potential data loss.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn57\">[lvii]</a>\r\n\r\nBecause of these interrelated concerns, it is critical that the archival and data curation systems available to ethnographic researchers have multiple and fine-grained levels of access and privacy controls. Tools must be developed that can appropriately manage confidential data and that allow researchers, working in conjunction with their respondents, to exercise control over their data, administer who has access to it, and account for culturally specific restrictions on data use.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn58\">[lviii]</a> One example of a system attempting to address these requirements is the Murkutu content management system (<a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/\">http://www.mukurtu.org/</a>), which makes cultural protocols a fundamental part of access to materials. This allows for the easy creation of fine-grained and culturally appropriate user groups with specifically defined usage rights, and it is being developed in cooperation with indigenous communities.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn59\">[lix]</a>\r\n\r\nBecause the nature of ethnographic materials makes them potentially subject to ongoing and evolving dilemmas of confidentiality and consent, archivists and data managers should understand that these materials may require ongoing curation, preferably through processes and procedures that incorporate researchers in a collaborative and meaningful way. Although many researchers would welcome the ability to more easily share their data, particularly in collaborative projects and in response to data-sharing requirements, they are almost universally resistant to any arrangement in which they would relinquish control over access to the data. As one anthropologist described:\r\n\r\nPeople don’t hesitate, at all, to share data with collaborators that they trust. … If you provide a mechanism for collaboration, even if it’s just Google Docs or something, you know, people share data easily and freely. It’s when it becomes an anonymous process that they seem to get balky. (1-02-100511)\r\n\r\nThe goal of making materials publically available online, then, will require archival systems and processes that are cognizant of the complex social relationships embedded within ethnographic materials, not only between the researcher and his or her respondents, but also between and among the many stakeholders in ethnographic data. The development of additional policies, ethical guidelines, and best practices by disciplinary organizations, funding agencies, universities, and cultural institutions could further aid researchers and archivists in navigating the ethical dilemmas contained in the archival process.\r\n\r\nBecause much ethnographic data is collected by individuals in relatively small and often idiosyncratic datasets, it is especially vulnerable to loss due to benign neglect or lack or resources, even if the data are historically unique. A sociologist described one such vulnerable dataset:\r\n\r\nWe did life histories of 45 people in a [church] congregation in [central Pennsylvania town]. . . . It’s probably the only body of material on a single congregation of that depth and complexity that exists, and I’m just too lazy to have figured out what to do with it and write it up and everything, but you could imagine somewhere somebody who wants to do research on congregations would find this incredibly valuable. But what’s going to happen to it [in the long term]? And what’s going to happen to it is, the copies I have will end up in a trash can, and my computer hard drive will eventually crash or get outmoded or get erased, and that’ll be the end of it [if there isn’t a place to archive it]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nIn order to prevent these losses, data management specialists and archivists must specifically curate these materials. They must also build relationships with ethnographers to resolve the unique ethical dilemmas these data present and the uneasy tensions between researchers’ desire to share data publically and obligations to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study.\r\n\r\nFinally, despite the acknowledged importance and value of archival materials to the disciplines and future researchers, academic rewards systems offer very little payoff for the work that goes into making ethnographic materials available, and ethnographic researchers are often under-resourced in the funding, time, and personnel support needed for preparing materials for archiving. <a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn60\">[lx]</a> Archivists must therefore work to make archival systems and the development of archival processes and policies as straightforward for researchers as possible, ideally assisting in integrating the development of metadata and other secondary materials (for example, codebooks, explanatory materials, finding aids, and ontologies) necessary to archiving and ensuring the long-term usefulness of primary data as early in the research process as possible. Likewise, funding agencies should improve funding for long-term data management, preservation, and curatorial services, either directly or via guidelines to institutions for recouping indirect costs, especially when the grant mandates archiving or public data accessibility. By providing these supports, archivists and funders would greatly assist researchers in responding to the imperatives of providing access to data and assuring the confidentiality and consent of their respondents, as well as resolving the ethical dilemmas contained in their data, thereby helping assure the preservation of irreplaceable ethnographic information.\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<hr align=\"left\" size=\"1\" width=\"33%\" />\r\n\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref48\">[xlviii]</a> Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 146; AAA, Code of Ethics, III.A.4.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref49\">[xlix]</a> The Society of American Archivists Oral History Section maintains a webpage summarizing the case and providing links to relevant documents at http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref50\">[l]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref51\">[li]</a> See Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294-95.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref52\">[lii]</a> See Corti, Day, and Backhouse,\" Confidentiality and Informed Consent,\" 4.4, on the expense of creating anonymized archives.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref53\">[liii]</a> ICPSR’s “Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving Phase 5: Preparing Data for Sharing” provides a model for these processes. See <a href=\"http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html\">http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html</a>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref54\">[liv]</a> Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 285.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref55\">[lv]</a> Silverman, “Introduction,” 6.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref56\">[lvi]</a> Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref57\">[lvii]</a> Ibid.<i>,</i> 17.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref58\">[lviii]</a> Ibid.<i>,</i> 17-18.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref59\">[lix]</a> A list of community groups and organizations participating in the Mukurtu project is available at http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref60\">[lx]</a> The NSF’s recent decision to list datasets as one of the research products to be included in the section of its grant proposals where researchers describe their qualifications does suggest, however, that the current rewards system may gradually be changing (see <a href=\"http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp\">http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp</a>).\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n</div>','Curating the Ethnographic Moment','','inherit','open','open','','4698-revision-14','','','2013-06-17 23:46:13','2013-06-17 23:46:13','',4698,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4698-revision-14/',0,'revision','',0),(4716,3,'2013-06-17 23:43:10','2013-06-17 23:43:10','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nBy vastly increasing the volume and types of data that field researchers can collect, digital technologies have reshaped ethnographers’ relationship with their accumulated research data and materials. Whereas paper-based fieldnotes and other physical ethnographic records are often deposited in repositories and made accessible only after a scholar’s death, the emergence of born-digital materials has created and enhanced possibilities for rapidly sharing data, not only with other researchers but also with research subjects and the public at large via online repositories. While many researchers support the principal of public access to research data, making this data available online can compound the ethical dilemmas ethnographers face. Ethnographers often find themselves torn between contradictory imperatives to share data publically and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study. ((L. Jahnke, A. Asher, and S.D.C. Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>, CLIR Publication #154 (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2012).))\r\n\r\nUnlike experimental data, ethnographic data, by definition, are not reproducible. ((See Sydel Silverman, “Introduction,” in <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, ed. Sydel Silverman and Nancy J. Parezo (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1995), 1.)) Ethnographic fieldwork is inextricably linked to a particular time, place, and society, making the primary data of ethnographers unique and unrecoverable. For this reason, today’s ethnographic fieldnotes are particularly important to preserve as tomorrow’s historical records; they document observations of places and cultures that—because they are in a constant state of change—will never exist in the same configuration again. Since ethnographic fieldnotes provide the empirical basis for researchers’ public authority, it would likewise seem logical for fieldnotes and other ethnographic materials to be made available for verification purposes in online repositories as soon as possible after the publication of research reports, articles, or monographs.\r\n\r\nHowever, several characteristics of ethnographic materials cause them to be particularly difficult to make publically accessible. First, many ethnographic researchers are reluctant to share their data for personal reasons. Ethnographic fieldnotes are intensely personal documents for many researchers, who often view them as extremely valuable for their own work, but doubt that they would be useful to other researchers without the accompanying contexts and experiences in which the materials were collected. Secondly, ethnographic materials also routinely contain private, confidential, or culturally sensitive information about both research subjects and the researcher, which often requires time-consuming or costly procedures to redact, and may limit or prevent public dissemination and secondary analyses of the data. Finally, ethnographic materials are regularly collected in contexts with varying or conflicting cultural standards for consent and data use, raising ethical questions about the efficacy of archiving these materials. For these reasons, balancing the multiple imperatives of data sharing, informed consent, and confidentiality for research participants is a fundamental issue for ethnographers preparing to deposit their materials in an archives, and the ethics surrounding these decisions was one of the most common and recurring themes in the interviews conducted for the study we present here.\r\n\r\nUsing data gathered during the 2011-2012 academic year in a qualitative study of researchers’ data management and curation practices, ((This study was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and managed by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). See Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) this article examines the practical and ethical dilemmas ethnographers face as they work with diverse research materials across varying, and sometimes conflicting, cultural standards for consent and data use. By emphasizing the everyday practices of researchers, this study sought to gain a holistic understanding of the workflows involved in the creation, management, and preservation of research data in order to better comprehend researchers’ unmet needs within data curation processes. Twenty-three researchers from varying ranks working in a variety of social science disciplines at five universities ((Penn State University, Lehigh University, Bucknell University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Pennsylvania.)) participated in interviews for this study (see Table 1), which focused on how researchers collect and analyze data, how they manage and preserve these data, and what training they have had in data-curation practices.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4704\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"273\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4704\" alt=\"Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants.  *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE-273x300.jpg\" width=\"273\" height=\"300\" /></a> Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants. *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.[/caption]\r\n\r\nAlthough scholars across many disciplines were grappling with the ethical and philosophical problems of data sharing—often in the absence of coherent policies for data archiving and release from funding agencies, professional organizations, or their employing institutions—this article will focus on the experiences of nine of these researchers who conducted ethnography as part of their data collection. Because ethnographic research involves a complex social interplay between researchers and respondents, often from differing cultural contexts, the management of these data presents unique difficulties for researchers who usually have little or no training in preservation, curation, or data-stewardship strategies. This article will examine how researchers navigate these difficulties when dealing with the two principal types of ethnographic data: fieldnotes—the diverse array of notes, writings, and other materials upon which researchers base their ethnographies ((Jean E. Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1.))—and the research artifacts, such as transcripts and audio or video recordings, produced from more formal, direct interactions with respondents.\r\n\r\n<b>The Data Sharing Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nFunding agencies—especially agencies administering public funds—are increasingly requiring qualitative research data to be made publically available. Since 1995, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)—a major source of funding for qualitative research in the United Kingdom—has required its awardees to archive their data as a condition of funding. ((See O. Parry and N. S. Mauthner, “Whose Data Are They Anyway?” <i>Sociology</i> 38, no. 1 (2004): 140-41.)) Similarly, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other US funding agencies (e.g. National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities) have begun to require formal data-management plans detailing how researchers will meet data-sharing expectations. Our assumption is that this trend will continue as both public and private funders seek maximum returns on their investment in research. While not always explicitly required, the goal of many of these policies is for research data to be deposited in an appropriate repository with online access for both other researchers and the public. For ethnographers, who are often accustomed to retaining exclusive rights over their fieldnotes and other materials, this can represent an uncomfortable shift in research practice, even when these repositories take into account the particular confidentiality and consent demands inherent to ethnographic research (discussed further below) and implement appropriate safeguards such as embargoing or redacting sensitive materials.\r\n\r\nIn principal, the ethnographic researchers we interviewed for this study saw data preservation and sharing as positive values, even if they were not sure about how to preserve and share data or who would potentially use the materials. When asked about what parts of her research data she would like to preserve, one anthropologist explained:\r\n\r\nThat’s the thing—If you keep anything long enough it becomes interesting. . . . For myself . . . I would love to archive everything and maybe put some kind of time stamp on personal information where it can’t be released for some amount of time. It’s so hard to know what people in the future would be interested in. . . . I try to keep data in such a way that hopefully it would be comprehensible to someone else if they were willing to work through my crazy software. . . . If I had somebody’s fieldnotes from 100 years ago from my field site, I’d be totally fascinated by that, so you never know what people are going to be interested in. (2-16-120211) ((The number in parentheses is the participant identification number; please refer to Table 1.))\r\n\r\nThe scholarly societies to which many of these researchers belong also broadly support data sharing and potential reuse. The most recent 2012 revision on the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) ethics statement explicitly states that it is the obligation of the researcher to preserve records and make results accessible, “Anthropologists have an ethical responsibility for ensuring the integrity, preservation, and protection of their work” and, the “results of anthropological research should be disseminated in a timely fashion” provided it is not “at the expense of protecting confidentiality.” ((American Anthropological Association (AAA), <i>Statement on Ethics: Principals of Professional Responsibility</i>, 2012, <a href=\"http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf\">http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf</a>.)) The previous 1998 version also addressed data access and preservation, but not as systematically or forcefully. ((This version was slightly revised in 2009 to make minor changes to some of the statement’s language. Since this revision did not alter the structure or main points of the statement, we continue to refer the 1998 version (as does the AAA’s ethics website). American Anthropological Association, Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, Statement, 1998, B.4-5, C1.)) Likewise, the American Sociological Association sets similar expectations in the data sharing section of its Code of Ethics. ((American Sociological Association, Code of Ethics, 1999, 13.05.))\r\n\r\nThe benefits of data archiving and sharing for scholarly disciplines and the advancement of knowledge are straightforward: preserved materials can be subjected to secondary analysis, unnecessary duplication of research can be minimized, historical records can be maintained, and, importantly, scholars can independently evaluate the validity of published results by consulting the primary data. ((Libby Bishop, “Ethical Sharing and Reuse of Qualitative Data,” <i>Australian Journal of Social Issues</i> 44, no. 3 (2009): 266.)) Furthermore, online repositories might enable new forms of scholarship and writing. For the first time, materials preserved and made accessible online have made it feasible to make publically available the corpus of primary texts that form the basis of support for ethnographic argumentation. While a non-digitized, paper-based collection could also serve this purpose, it is unlikely that more than a handful of interested readers of a particular ethnography would physically travel to the repository to examine the documents. Repositories that make resources available online fundamentally change this dynamic. In <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive, </i>Johannes Fabian explores these possibilities by conducting what he describes as an experiment with “writing ethnography ‘in the presence of texts’” located in a publically accessible online repository. ((Johannes Fabian, <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive</i> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), vii.)) Fabian terms this genre of writing “commentary,” a text-centered form of ethnography that assumes his reader can simultaneously consult a primary text for her or himself via an online archive. ((Ibid., 9-13.))\r\n\r\nThe text Fabian utilizes is a conversation he and Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel had about a ceremony Kahenga conducted at Fabian’s home in Zaire in 1974. ((Ibid., 3.)) The transcription, translation, and an audio excerpt of the discussion are now housed in the Archives of Popular Swahili on the website of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa project. ((Johannes. Fabian, “‘Magic and Modernity’: A Conversation with a Herbalist and Practitioner of Magic,” trans. Johannes Fabian, <i>Archives of Popular Swahili</i> 7 (2005), <a href=\"http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction\">http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction</a>.)) Fabian argues that the repository of documents serves an important epistemological purpose by “mediat[ing] between . . . events, the presentation of evidence, and our aims and claims to produce anthropological knowledge.” ((Fabian, “Magic,” 123.)) By allowing the reader of an ethnography to interrogate and evaluate the primary data on which it is based, the archive reveals how ethnographies are composed through the confrontation between the researcher, his or her respondents, and the texts they co-create. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography</i>, 54. One does wonder, however, why Fabian considered a traditionally published monograph necessary to this project, rather than simply including it in the archive. Given that his book annotates the online texts using paragraph numbers that assume a specific online layout, it would seem more effective to have created hyperlinks between the commentary and the primary materials. In this way, the “experiment” seems incomplete.))\r\n\r\nFabian’s instructive experiment notwithstanding, for many researchers the practice of making ethnographic materials available online is fraught. Ethnography requires researchers to occupy a methodological position that mediates and translates between multiple cultural contexts. This positioning leads to a number of difficulties for ethnographers as they attempt to meet their obligations to multiple constituencies—including funders, cultural institutions, and the researcher’s employing university, in addition to the individuals and communities the researcher works with—while negotiating the processes of placing materials in archives and repositories. When working with human subjects, ethical pitfalls abound, and often ethnographers must resolve contradictions between these groups.\r\n\r\nAt a very basic level, policies requiring access to research data may “directly [contradict] some ethnic groups’ cultural traditions concerning secrecy and controlled access to information.” ((David Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates,” <i>Annual Review of Anthropology</i> 41, no. 1 (2012): 472, doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721. See also G. Isaac, “Whose Idea Was This?: Museums, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge,” <i>Current Anthropology</i> 52, no. 2 (2011) 211-233.)) For example, an anthropologist might gain access to knowledge that is secret, or restricted for cultural or social reasons. During his fieldwork with the Saramaka, a group in Suriname who descended from escaped African slaves, Richard Price gained knowledge about the “Old-Time People” who experienced the war for liberation from roughly 1680 to 1762. ((Richard Price, <i>First Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 5-6. For additional examples and a discussion of cross-cultural differences in relation to access to knowledge see Nancy J. Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage: CoPAR, Anthropological Records, and the Archival Community,” <i>The American Archivist </i>62 (1999): 285, note 24.)) The Saramaka consider knowledge about this time and these people powerful, dangerous, and restricted. Price struggled with the ethical implications of publishing a book within a different cultural system that uses this knowledge as its primary subject. ((Price, <i>First Time, </i>21-23.)) Price notes that by putting the information in a public document, he potentially “deprives [the] author of control (except perhaps via the language in which [the book] appears) over [his or her] audience.” ((Ibid., 23.)) This problem is compounded exponentially once information is made available online (as Price’s book now is, at least in part, in Google Books) by removing even the physical restrictions of a bound monograph.\r\n\r\nInformation need not be “exotic” to create publishing difficulties for ethnographers. For example, an ethnographer working in a corporate, government, or other institutional setting in the United States might be privy to proprietary or confidential information about a product or service that must be ethically and legally protected. A researcher in environmental engineering explained her process when conducting interviews:\r\n\r\nAnother big concern is confidentiality because I record those conversations, and then there’s kind of an extended period of time in which I allow those who I’ve talked with to redact parts of our conversation if they’ve talked about things they would prefer to remain private. . . I’m talking to several companies about the development and production of their technologies and so there’s some proprietary information that comes up and that’s really the main concern. (5-20-020212)\r\n\r\nIndeed, accidental release of this type of information might put the researcher at as much legal risk as her respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen preparing to preserve ethnographic data, issues of ownership and authorship are also not always straightforward, and it is imperative that researchers communicate and address these potential problems with archivists, data curators, and repository and digital collection managers before depositing ethnographic materials. For example, consent forms for interviews might not clearly state who holds the copyright or who has a license to use the recording or transcripts, potentially leading to confusion over the legal status of these materials and making it more difficult for a researcher to transfer materials to an archives. Intellectual property and copyright are themselves culturally specific concepts, and a legal right to dispose of or deposit materials as a researcher sees fit does not equal an ethical right to do so. The people providing information, the funders, the institution that employs the researcher, and the community in which the researcher works all have a moral interest in the disposition of the data. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 142.)) Parry and Mauthner go so far as to say, “[B]ecause the construction of qualitative data is a joint endeavor between respondent and researcher, both parties should retain authorship/ownership rights over the data,” which creates “practical, legal and ethical implications for archiving and re-use.” ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 141.))\r\n\r\nSome researchers, including Fabian, argue that since ethnographers and their respondents are joint agents in creating ethnographic materials, both parties should be named to acknowledge their contributions. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) However, naming respondents as authors or contributors contradicts an ethnographer’s imperative to protect the confidentiality of their research participants, which is a basic standard required by most Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved research and by professional-ethics statements. While David Zeitlyn observes that “a default assumption that notes will be anonymized conflicts with an individual’s moral right to be recognized as the author of his or her words,” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 470.)) many, if not most, ethnographers would likely be uncomfortable naming their participants in almost any context, but especially in publically accessible online repositories. This is likely to hold true even if a researcher philosophically accepts that his or her authority to determine the level of sensitivity that the data require privileges the researcher’s position vis-à-vis his or her respondents. ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 148.))\r\n\r\nMany ethnographers thus understand themselves not so much as owners of their data, but rather as stewards or custodians of data that are produced by a complex set of relationships between researchers and respondents. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4-5.)) As the stewards of these data, researchers are often the de facto interpreters of the terms by which data are made available, choosing what and when to publish or deposit materials in repositories or archives. Despite his assertion that correspondents should be named, Fabian notes that he exercises this stewardship by attempting not to publish anything that might be dangerous or damaging to the people with whom he worked—a position that is probably made easier by the fact that the texts he is working with were already 30 years old when he transcribed and posted them on the web. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) Many researchers we interviewed adopted a similar “attitude of moral responsibility towards research participants, expressed in the way in which data are handled,” ((Annamaria Carusi and Marina Jirotka, “From Data Archive to Ethical Labyrinth,” <i>Qualitative Research</i> 9, no. 3 (2009): 292.)) citing ethical concerns about appropriate use of the data as well as issues of confidentiality and consent. Even for researchers who support public access to data, these concerns cause them to question funders’ data-sharing requirements. A researcher in education who was preparing to apply for additional funding to create a longitudinal dataset by re-interviewing her previous respondents noted her uncertainty:\r\n\r\nI know that a lot of places when you apply for funding they want eventually for [data] to become public. I haven’t had to deal with it, but I’ve definitely thought about it. . . . I want to make sure to preserve the qualitative data because it’s very important to me . . . so it’s a concern for me personally to save it. . . . [But] once it’s public, or shared between other people, I would like to get help eventually on making the data itself more confidential because they are just interview transcripts which, you know, there are a lot of [confidentiality] issues with that, and that I would have to [make the data itself more confidential] before I shared it. . . . I don’t know if there are limits to the extent to which I can make it public or not. (1-04-100511)\r\n\r\nIn the context of making their data accessible, these confidentiality and consent negotiations are some of the most difficult issues for scholars to resolve before depositing their ethnographic materials in data repositories or archives. These issues are also most effectively addressed as early in a research project as possible, so that researchers can implement the necessary practices and protocols to insure that confidentiality and consent can be assured in the long term prior to data collection. As Charles Humphrey and his colleagues discuss, the integral involvement of archivists and data-curation specialists in the planning stages and throughout qualitative research projects greatly increases the quality of the data products and decreases ethical problems associated with deposition in repositories and archives. ((Charles K. Humphrey, Carole A. Estabrooks, Judy R. Norris, Jane E. Smith, and Kathryn L. Hesketh, “Archivist on Board: Contributions to the Research Team,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000).)) As they point out, this collaboration is beneficial to both researchers and archivists, since good archival preparation practices are often synonymous with good research practices. ((Humphrey et al., “Archivist on Board,” 5.))\r\n\r\nDespite efforts by organizations such as the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR) to foster this type of collaboration ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage.”)) and educate ethnographers in data curation and archival preparation practices, ((CoPAR has released a series of fourteen bulletins outlining specific issues involved in the preservation of anthropological materials and addressed to practicing anthropologists. These bulletins are available at <a href=\"http://copar.org/bulletins.htm\">http://copar.org/bulletins.htm</a>. Unfortunately, since most of these bulletins were written in the late 1990s, many of the technology discussions are out of date. However, the conceptual discussions remain highly relevant.)) it appears that relatively few ethnographers seek out the assistance of archivists or data management specialists until after data collection is completed, unless funding requirements compelled them to do so. Of the ethnographers we interviewed, only two had consulted with data management services prior to the data collection phase of their research, both as a result of the NSF’s requirement that data-management plans be included in new funding proposals. Only one project had a systematic plan for depositing its ethnographic data in an archives, principally because this research was conducted as part of a very large and well-funded research initiative. This project had amassed some 40,000 pages of ethnographic fieldnotes, which were being preserved but not yet been shared publically. The researcher leading this project explained:\r\n\r\nIt’s news to anthropologists that data should be made public. It’s not something that’s in their mindset. In fact they are appalled by it. . . . However, that [ethnographic] data was paid for using a million dollars of federal money and I’m using it with some of my grad students who are essentially doing secondary analysis of fieldnotes. I think that in the long run that data should be made public, and could be, but very carefully. . . . I don’t think that’s a problem . . . my guess is we’re going to get there. . . . A very new area now is “what do you do with electronic fieldnotes?” and “can those be made available for researchers?” If nothing else, I think this archive of fieldnotes . . .in 20 or 30 years could be a great historical source and should be preserved on that basis. So, I would like to see us work out ways of carefully having anthropological and ethnographic data made public too. (5-11-103011)\r\n\r\nIn working out the procedures for sharing these materials, this researcher went on to emphasize the paramount importance of protecting research participants’ confidentiality. Indeed, all of the ethnographers cited confidentiality concerns as one of the foremost issues that they would need to discuss and resolve with an archivist or repository manager before depositing their materials, making it perhaps the most critical area for developing collaborative practices between researchers, data curators, and archivists.\r\n\r\n<b>The Confidentiality Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nThe ethics statements of both the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association require researchers to protect the confidentiality of their respondents (although the AAA statement asserts that expectations of credit should also be addressed). ((ASA, Code of Ethics, 11; AAA, Statement on Ethics (Part 3), 7.)) Protecting research participants’ confidentiality is routinely an explicit promise within social science research, and is an almost universally assumed requirement of IRBs when reviewing research proposals. Setting aside the research participant’s potential moral right to authorship as discussed above, the nature of ethnographic research often renders the promise of confidentiality problematic, if not outright impossible. As Zachary Schrag observes, maintaining the confidentiality of fieldwork sites and research participants discussed in publications has been a perennial problem for social science researchers, as details necessary to make ethnographic and other fieldwork-based writing meaningful often simultaneously make these places and people identifiable, especially to people familiar with the location or topic. ((Zachary M. Schrag, <i>Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 15.)) Increasing confidentiality protections almost always come at the cost of decreasing the amount of contextual information included for the ethnography’s audience, and can effectively prevent data from being deposited in an archives or repository (or sometimes even collected). A sociologist recounted the difficulties he encountered on one project:\r\n\r\nI wanted to do life histories with priests [in central Pennsylvania], and part of the problem was . . . we got into a situation where people might tell me things about their personal lives that are sort of not confidential in the IRB sense but that might be upsetting to their congregations—like I talked to one priest who had been married three times, where if the congregation had known about that they would have been very upset. There’s nothing illegal about it; this person’s not shy about telling that, but it could have been damaging. But I had the sense that . . . if I went around and did these interviews, I didn’t want to destroy the data because I thought they had some historical importance. . . . [The IRB said,] “and when you get done with this study if you’re not going to destroy the data you have to store it in an archive for 50 years, and I checked with [university] archives and they said, “we’re not going to store anything like that.” . . . I wanted to preserve the data, but there was no way to do it. . . . I actually quit the project [because the IRB made it impossible to do]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nWhile protecting research participants’ privacy can be difficult, even in carefully prepared and edited publications, the nature of ethnographic materials makes them especially difficult to confidentially preserve over time. Audio and video recordings present obvious confidentiality problems by capturing a respondents’ voice or image, ((For a discussion of the extreme difficulty of archiving video and audio data anonymously, see Louise Corti, Annette Day, and Gill Backhouse, “Confidentiality and Informed Consent: Issues for Consideration in the Preservation of and Provision of Access to Qualitative Data Archives,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 4.4c, <a href=\"http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024\">http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024</a>.)) but even interview transcripts can be problematic. A common practice in archiving ethnographic materials is to make attempts to remove potentially identifying information from archived transcripts. However, even these “anonymized” transcripts often still contain personal details that allow the possible identification of research participants. For example, in the interviews conducted for this study, participants regularly discussed their discipline and research interests. Coupled with the names of the universities where the research was conducted—which are contained in all of our research proposals and publications—this seemingly innocuous information would probably render any of our participants identifiable with a simple web search if the full interview transcripts were released. This might not seem like a significant risk for scholars describing projects that they routinely discuss publically, but depending on the other details contained in the transcript it might also be embarrassing or potentially damaging (for example, comments about university administrators, other colleagues, etc.). As is often the case with qualitative research, removing these contextual details would diminish, if not destroy, the usefulness of these data to future researchers—the ostensible audience for these materials. Unfortunately, each piece of contextual detail retained about a research participant to aid in data interpretation simultaneously creates more potential for identification.\r\n\r\nGiven technological advances, removing all conceivably identifying details might still be insufficient to guarantee that transcripts are rendered anonymous. In fact, anonymizing transcripts may soon no longer be technically possible. Arvind Narayana and his colleagues have demonstrated that it is possible to accurately identify anonymous online authors up to 20 percent of the time based on writing style alone, given a sufficient corpus of example texts. ((A. Narayanan, H. Paskov, N. Z. Gong, J. Bethencourt, E. Stefanov, E. C. R. Shin, and D. Song, “On the Feasibility of Internet-scale Author Identification,” Security and Privacy (SP), 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 20-23, 2012): 301, <a href=\"http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420\">http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420</a>.)) As more and more content moves online, one can only assume that these techniques will become more robust, so that identifying a participant from the vocabulary or speech patterns in a transcript may eventually become a matter of applying the correct software. These realities set up even the most well-intentioned researchers to fail to meet the obligations required by IRBs and the agreements made with their respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen archiving ethnographic materials, confidentiality can also be equally important for protecting the researcher. This is especially true for the archiving of fieldnotes, which are profoundly personal for many ethnographic researchers. Researchers are often quite ambivalent about these data, regularly describing feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, or embarrassment about their work and what it reveals about them as scholars. ((Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” 10-12.)) When talking about her data collection process, an anthropologist in our study observed:\r\n\r\nThat’s the thing with fieldnotes, you never show them to anyone . . . as long as it works for you . . . it’s not like you have to show it to someone else and have them make sense of it, which is kind of a shame because it would be nice to have data in formats where people could, you know, sort of, archive that information. (2-16-120211)\r\n\r\nIn his study of fieldnote practices, Jean Jackson observes, “Many respondents point out that the highly personal nature of fieldnotes influences the extent of one’s willingness to share them: ‘Fieldnotes can reveal how worthless your work was, the lacunae, your linguistic incompetence, your not being made a blood brother, your childish temper.’” ((Ibid., 22.)) Anthropologist Simon Ottenberg describes his fieldnotes similarly, “[W]hen I was younger, I would have felt uncomfortable at the thought of someone else using my notes, whether I was alive or dead—they are so much a private thing, so much an aspect of personal field experience, so much a private language, so much part of my ego, my childhood [as an anthropologist], and my personal maturity.” ((Simon Ottenberg, “Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1990), 153.)) This attachment and ambivalence may make researchers reluctant to turn over control of their notes to an archives—especially one that has the purpose of making materials available publically on the internet. This professional practice not only makes it very difficult to substantiate or verify ethnographers’ data, suggesting a need for ethnographers to develop more proactive and sensitive data-sharing procedures, but also creates a situation where ethnographic materials are saved, but with inadequate plans for preservation. Zeitlyn notes, “Paradoxically most anthropologists want neither to destroy their field material nor archive it.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn41\">[xli]</a> So, too, with our study: almost no one had made plans for their data beyond the short term, let alone the final dispensation of their materials at the end of their career or after their death.\r\n\r\nWhile archivists regularly assure scholars that the papers of “ordinary” or not-famous researchers are sometimes the most valuable,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn42\">[xlii]</a> researchers themselves are often unconvinced. Many of our respondents had trouble imagining the potential audience for their data and primary materials, although one Environmental Studies researcher shared data on graffiti images she collected during fieldwork following a particular ethnic conflict event. The data were not directly related to her primary research questions, but another scholar used them in a Master’s thesis (and possibly in a future dissertation). Nevertheless, doubts about future usefulness contribute to researchers’ reluctance to undertake sometimes arduous and time-consuming data preservation and annotation tasks, such as redacting confidential information, and to neglect advance planning for the eventual archiving of their materials, such as assuring adequate consent procedures. This is potentially a key area of advocacy for data curators and archivists, who are well positioned to both educate researchers in the importance of preserving primary data for future generations of researchers, even if its immediate value is not apparent, and to provide tools such as cross-indexes and finding aids that make these data more useful and comparable.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn43\">[xliii]</a>\r\n\r\n<b>The Consent Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nBoth IRBs and disciplinary societies’ ethics statements emphasize the importance and necessity of obtaining informed consent from research participants. Given the possibility of archiving materials indefinitely, and especially for web publication, obtaining fully informed consent may be a futile endeavor. Libby Bishop points out that because researchers cannot adequately speculate on all the uses in which data might be employed, explicit consent is “logically impossible.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn44\">[xliv]</a> However, Bishop also observes that this should not paralyze researchers from depositing their materials in archives, since consent for the primary research activity is in itself partial and no researcher can fully explain all information about any research project.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn45\">[xlv]</a> Zeitlyn makes this point in another way, noting that cultural differences may also limit the ability of a researcher to obtain consent in a way that is recognizable to IRBs: “Once material is archived, it may be consulted by unknown others who might use it in novel ways. . . . Can a researcher obtain meaningful prior informed consent if the uses to which the material might be put in the future cannot be explained?”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn46\">[xlvi]</a>\r\n\r\nWhile Bishop suggests responding to this problem by providing examples of how archived research might be reused or by obtaining open-ended consent,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn47\">[xlvii]</a> others suggest a more comprehensive approach that understands consent as a process rather than a one-time event.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn48\">[xlviii]</a> This approach presents significant difficulties when applied to the lifecycle of an entire ethnographic research project, especially once data and other fieldwork materials are deposited in an archives for the purpose of long-term access and preservation. If appropriate consent for archiving is not obtained at the outset of a project, or is sought when new uses are discovered for materials, contacting participants to authorize this usage can be extremely difficult and costly for ethnographers, if not outright impossible. Furthermore, a consent model that requires re-contacting participants also requires confidentiality or anonymization procedures to be reversible, meaning that the researcher must retain records that can link individuals to the materials about them. Retaining contact information or other identifying records is not best practice for assuring participant confidentiality, and in the case of truly sensitive research, doing so unnecessarily maintains records that could be subject to subpoena or otherwise compromised. For example, in 2012 the US Department of Justice issued a subpoena in connection with a murder investigation on behalf of Great Britain for access to oral history interviews conducted with Irish Republican Army and Loyalist paramilitary members as part of “The Belfast Project,” archived at Boston College’s Burns Library. While the project’s confidentiality agreement promised interviewees that these materials would be embargoed until their death, this guarantee was subject to exceptions required by American law; a point that may have been unclear to the research participants. Both Boston College and the researchers are presently contesting the subpoenas, but the initial rulings by a federal district court and the First Circuit Court of Appeals have found that the subpoenas are legal.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn49\">[xlix]</a> As this case demonstrates, whenever identifying information exists, there is a possibility that its disclosure can be compelled. From the point of view of research-participant confidentiality, it is therefore preferable to destroy materials that enable identification or re-contact as soon as possible after research is complete.\r\n\r\nSince anonymization is an all-or-nothing decision that must be irreversible, even for the researcher, if it is to be effective,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn50\">[l]</a> in order to make consent an ongoing process, one must also accept that the data cannot be made fully anonymous. The question then becomes how researchers can meaningfully extend consent decisions to include archives without rendering them unmanageable for their administrators or unnecessarily diminishing their analytical value.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn51\">[li]</a> Balancing the need to maintain appropriate levels of confidentiality with the administrative costs is a critical area for collaboration between researchers, archivists, and data specialists. Fully anonymizing datasets is probably neither necessary, nor cost effective, for relatively low-risk materials,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn52\">[lii]</a> but both the researcher and the archivists must fully understand the potential risk scenarios before these decisions can be made, particularly in an environment where privacy protections are an increasing concern for research participants. While discussing the challenges he faces in complying with funder’s public access requirements, a sociologist observed:\r\n\r\nClearly the biggest problem is the problem of protection of privacy. The concern of privacy has been ramped up tremendously over the last 10 or 15 years, and the process of getting permission to analyze data can be difficult, but a trend in social science data is to include more and more information that\'s sensitive. . . . I think the field is trying to now establish appropriate levels of protection for particular kinds of data and is trying to balance this problem of privacy with public access. And it is a challenge and it’s going to require some new modes of doing things. (5-11-103111)\r\n\r\nDeveloping these modes of work and processes of consent requires not only the participation of researchers and scholarly societies, but also intensive cooperation with data management specialists, technologists, and archivists.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn53\">[liii]</a>\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusions and Recommendations</b>\r\n\r\nResearchers and archivists alike face tremendous challenges in effectively preserving ethnographic research data and providing meaningful access for researchers and other stakeholders while simultaneously protecting sensitive data. In order to be effective, data sharing, confidentiality, and consent imperatives all require the active participation and investment of researchers themselves. Decisions about access, issues of authorship attribution, adequate consent, and the level of confidentially required cannot be made without the input of someone who is deeply knowledgeable about the contexts in which the research took place. However, as we have seen, none of these decision processes necessarily end at the moment when the materials are deposited in an archives or repository, and a researcher’s ethical obligation to his or her research participants does not end once he or she has transferred responsibility for their preservation. This sense of responsibility makes many researchers reluctant to relinquish control over their ethnographic materials, lest changing political, social, or cultural conditions necessitates a more restrictive approach to data access than was initially required.\r\n\r\nFor example, an Environmental Studies researcher noted that currently her data does not present much risk to her respondents:\r\n\r\nMost of the data I’ve collected really have limited privacy issues or any kind of harm that could come to respondents. There are some topics that I’ve looked at, that depending on, when—you know, timeliness—at what point these were published, that identifying information could be problematic. In [central Asian country] it’s a lot easier—at least currently—the situation for my topics isn’t dangerous. That doesn’t mean it can’t be in the future and if I extended the research to neighboring countries then I would probably have some more serious confidentiality issues. (2-12-111011)\r\n\r\nIf the political situation for her respondents changed, however, this researcher might be ethically obligated to change the access conditions of any materials that she had archived, even if her consent procedures had addressed this eventuality. Repositories for ethnographic materials must be careful to include procedures to respond to these types of situations in their donor agreements, and researchers should discuss the unique qualities of ethnographic materials prior to their deposit. As Parezo points out, “it is unethical and unreasonable to expect the archival community to guess which fieldnotes contain sensitive information and what are reasonable use restrictions.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn54\">[liv]</a>\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, preparing materials for deposit into an archives is often a low priority for ethnographers for a variety of reasons, and the archiving of ethnographic data is further hindered by a persistent lack of training. While comprehensive historical review is beyond the scope of this article, Silverman already noted the problem of a lack of formal training in data collection and management practices among anthropologists almost 20 years ago,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn55\">[lv]</a> before the rise of many of the complications that the expansion of digital data collection created. Almost none of the scholars we interviewed reported that data curation or stewardship training was part of their graduate curriculum, and data management was usually only addressed narrowly in relation to methodological approaches and problems. The ethical and practical difficulties involved in managing and preserving large amounts of research data were rarely addressed, with most researchers acquiring the skills they needed via trial and error.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn56\">[lvi]</a> None of the scholars interviewed during this study expressed satisfaction with their level of expertise in data management, and few had access to individuals who could provide knowledgeable guidance. While it would be preferable for graduate curricula to include this type of training, it seems unlikely that this change will occur in the near term. It is, therefore, likely that archivists and data specialists will need to provide this training, preferably by developing relationships with ethnographic researchers as early as possible in the research process.\r\n\r\nThe lack of confidence in their data-management training compounds researchers’ apprehension about the ethical issues contained in their data. Researchers are naturally—and rightfully—conservative about the potential risks in sharing data, especially if they are not convinced they can protect their respondents’ confidentiality, or that they have obtained appropriate consent—issues that the difficulties of cross-cultural communication make more complex. Without such assurances that these ethical imperatives can be addressed, many researchers are unlikely to invest in archiving their materials. “In many cases, their desire to avoid the ethical risks of inappropriate data release may outweigh the costs of potential data loss.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn57\">[lvii]</a>\r\n\r\nBecause of these interrelated concerns, it is critical that the archival and data curation systems available to ethnographic researchers have multiple and fine-grained levels of access and privacy controls. Tools must be developed that can appropriately manage confidential data and that allow researchers, working in conjunction with their respondents, to exercise control over their data, administer who has access to it, and account for culturally specific restrictions on data use.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn58\">[lviii]</a> One example of a system attempting to address these requirements is the Murkutu content management system (<a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/\">http://www.mukurtu.org/</a>), which makes cultural protocols a fundamental part of access to materials. This allows for the easy creation of fine-grained and culturally appropriate user groups with specifically defined usage rights, and it is being developed in cooperation with indigenous communities.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn59\">[lix]</a>\r\n\r\nBecause the nature of ethnographic materials makes them potentially subject to ongoing and evolving dilemmas of confidentiality and consent, archivists and data managers should understand that these materials may require ongoing curation, preferably through processes and procedures that incorporate researchers in a collaborative and meaningful way. Although many researchers would welcome the ability to more easily share their data, particularly in collaborative projects and in response to data-sharing requirements, they are almost universally resistant to any arrangement in which they would relinquish control over access to the data. As one anthropologist described:\r\n\r\nPeople don’t hesitate, at all, to share data with collaborators that they trust. … If you provide a mechanism for collaboration, even if it’s just Google Docs or something, you know, people share data easily and freely. It’s when it becomes an anonymous process that they seem to get balky. (1-02-100511)\r\n\r\nThe goal of making materials publically available online, then, will require archival systems and processes that are cognizant of the complex social relationships embedded within ethnographic materials, not only between the researcher and his or her respondents, but also between and among the many stakeholders in ethnographic data. The development of additional policies, ethical guidelines, and best practices by disciplinary organizations, funding agencies, universities, and cultural institutions could further aid researchers and archivists in navigating the ethical dilemmas contained in the archival process.\r\n\r\nBecause much ethnographic data is collected by individuals in relatively small and often idiosyncratic datasets, it is especially vulnerable to loss due to benign neglect or lack or resources, even if the data are historically unique. A sociologist described one such vulnerable dataset:\r\n\r\nWe did life histories of 45 people in a [church] congregation in [central Pennsylvania town]. . . . It’s probably the only body of material on a single congregation of that depth and complexity that exists, and I’m just too lazy to have figured out what to do with it and write it up and everything, but you could imagine somewhere somebody who wants to do research on congregations would find this incredibly valuable. But what’s going to happen to it [in the long term]? And what’s going to happen to it is, the copies I have will end up in a trash can, and my computer hard drive will eventually crash or get outmoded or get erased, and that’ll be the end of it [if there isn’t a place to archive it]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nIn order to prevent these losses, data management specialists and archivists must specifically curate these materials. They must also build relationships with ethnographers to resolve the unique ethical dilemmas these data present and the uneasy tensions between researchers’ desire to share data publically and obligations to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study.\r\n\r\nFinally, despite the acknowledged importance and value of archival materials to the disciplines and future researchers, academic rewards systems offer very little payoff for the work that goes into making ethnographic materials available, and ethnographic researchers are often under-resourced in the funding, time, and personnel support needed for preparing materials for archiving. <a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn60\">[lx]</a> Archivists must therefore work to make archival systems and the development of archival processes and policies as straightforward for researchers as possible, ideally assisting in integrating the development of metadata and other secondary materials (for example, codebooks, explanatory materials, finding aids, and ontologies) necessary to archiving and ensuring the long-term usefulness of primary data as early in the research process as possible. Likewise, funding agencies should improve funding for long-term data management, preservation, and curatorial services, either directly or via guidelines to institutions for recouping indirect costs, especially when the grant mandates archiving or public data accessibility. By providing these supports, archivists and funders would greatly assist researchers in responding to the imperatives of providing access to data and assuring the confidentiality and consent of their respondents, as well as resolving the ethical dilemmas contained in their data, thereby helping assure the preservation of irreplaceable ethnographic information.\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<hr align=\"left\" size=\"1\" width=\"33%\" />\r\n\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref41\">[xli]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref42\">[xlii]</a> Catherine Fowler, \"Ethical Considerations,\" in Silverman and Parezo, <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, 64-65; Robert Leopold, “The Second Life of Ethnographic Fieldnotes,” <i>Ateliers d\'anthropologie</i> 32 (2008): 4.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref43\">[xliii]</a> Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 301-305. See also Louise Corti, “Progress and Problems of Preserving and Providing Access to Qualitative Data for Social Research—The International Picture of an Emerging Culture,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 10.1.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref44\">[xliv]</a> Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref45\">[xlv]</a> Ibid., 264.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref46\">[xlvi]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471; see also Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 147.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref47\">[xlvii]</a> Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref48\">[xlviii]</a> Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 146; AAA, Code of Ethics, III.A.4.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref49\">[xlix]</a> The Society of American Archivists Oral History Section maintains a webpage summarizing the case and providing links to relevant documents at http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref50\">[l]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref51\">[li]</a> See Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294-95.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref52\">[lii]</a> See Corti, Day, and Backhouse,\" Confidentiality and Informed Consent,\" 4.4, on the expense of creating anonymized archives.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref53\">[liii]</a> ICPSR’s “Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving Phase 5: Preparing Data for Sharing” provides a model for these processes. See <a href=\"http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html\">http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html</a>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref54\">[liv]</a> Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 285.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref55\">[lv]</a> Silverman, “Introduction,” 6.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref56\">[lvi]</a> Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref57\">[lvii]</a> Ibid.<i>,</i> 17.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref58\">[lviii]</a> Ibid.<i>,</i> 17-18.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref59\">[lix]</a> A list of community groups and organizations participating in the Mukurtu project is available at http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref60\">[lx]</a> The NSF’s recent decision to list datasets as one of the research products to be included in the section of its grant proposals where researchers describe their qualifications does suggest, however, that the current rewards system may gradually be changing (see <a href=\"http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp\">http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp</a>).\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n</div>','Curating the Ethnographic Moment','','inherit','open','open','','4698-revision-13','','','2013-06-17 23:43:10','2013-06-17 23:43:10','',4698,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4698-revision-13/',0,'revision','',0),(4715,3,'2013-06-17 23:40:54','2013-06-17 23:40:54','<b>Introduction</b>\r\n\r\nBy vastly increasing the volume and types of data that field researchers can collect, digital technologies have reshaped ethnographers’ relationship with their accumulated research data and materials. Whereas paper-based fieldnotes and other physical ethnographic records are often deposited in repositories and made accessible only after a scholar’s death, the emergence of born-digital materials has created and enhanced possibilities for rapidly sharing data, not only with other researchers but also with research subjects and the public at large via online repositories. While many researchers support the principal of public access to research data, making this data available online can compound the ethical dilemmas ethnographers face. Ethnographers often find themselves torn between contradictory imperatives to share data publically and to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study. ((L. Jahnke, A. Asher, and S.D.C. Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>, CLIR Publication #154 (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2012).))\r\n\r\nUnlike experimental data, ethnographic data, by definition, are not reproducible. ((See Sydel Silverman, “Introduction,” in <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, ed. Sydel Silverman and Nancy J. Parezo (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1995), 1.)) Ethnographic fieldwork is inextricably linked to a particular time, place, and society, making the primary data of ethnographers unique and unrecoverable. For this reason, today’s ethnographic fieldnotes are particularly important to preserve as tomorrow’s historical records; they document observations of places and cultures that—because they are in a constant state of change—will never exist in the same configuration again. Since ethnographic fieldnotes provide the empirical basis for researchers’ public authority, it would likewise seem logical for fieldnotes and other ethnographic materials to be made available for verification purposes in online repositories as soon as possible after the publication of research reports, articles, or monographs.\r\n\r\nHowever, several characteristics of ethnographic materials cause them to be particularly difficult to make publically accessible. First, many ethnographic researchers are reluctant to share their data for personal reasons. Ethnographic fieldnotes are intensely personal documents for many researchers, who often view them as extremely valuable for their own work, but doubt that they would be useful to other researchers without the accompanying contexts and experiences in which the materials were collected. Secondly, ethnographic materials also routinely contain private, confidential, or culturally sensitive information about both research subjects and the researcher, which often requires time-consuming or costly procedures to redact, and may limit or prevent public dissemination and secondary analyses of the data. Finally, ethnographic materials are regularly collected in contexts with varying or conflicting cultural standards for consent and data use, raising ethical questions about the efficacy of archiving these materials. For these reasons, balancing the multiple imperatives of data sharing, informed consent, and confidentiality for research participants is a fundamental issue for ethnographers preparing to deposit their materials in an archives, and the ethics surrounding these decisions was one of the most common and recurring themes in the interviews conducted for the study we present here.\r\n\r\nUsing data gathered during the 2011-2012 academic year in a qualitative study of researchers’ data management and curation practices, ((This study was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and managed by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). See Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.)) this article examines the practical and ethical dilemmas ethnographers face as they work with diverse research materials across varying, and sometimes conflicting, cultural standards for consent and data use. By emphasizing the everyday practices of researchers, this study sought to gain a holistic understanding of the workflows involved in the creation, management, and preservation of research data in order to better comprehend researchers’ unmet needs within data curation processes. Twenty-three researchers from varying ranks working in a variety of social science disciplines at five universities ((Penn State University, Lehigh University, Bucknell University, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Pennsylvania.)) participated in interviews for this study (see Table 1), which focused on how researchers collect and analyze data, how they manage and preserve these data, and what training they have had in data-curation practices.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_4704\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"273\"]<a href=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE.jpg\"><img class=\"size-medium wp-image-4704\" alt=\"Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants.  *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.\" src=\"http://dev.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/asher-jahnke_remixed_3_TABLE-273x300.jpg\" width=\"273\" height=\"300\" /></a> Table 1. Rank and academic discipline of the study participants. *The nine starred participants conducted significant amounts of ethnographic research.[/caption]\r\n\r\nAlthough scholars across many disciplines were grappling with the ethical and philosophical problems of data sharing—often in the absence of coherent policies for data archiving and release from funding agencies, professional organizations, or their employing institutions—this article will focus on the experiences of nine of these researchers who conducted ethnography as part of their data collection. Because ethnographic research involves a complex social interplay between researchers and respondents, often from differing cultural contexts, the management of these data presents unique difficulties for researchers who usually have little or no training in preservation, curation, or data-stewardship strategies. This article will examine how researchers navigate these difficulties when dealing with the two principal types of ethnographic data: fieldnotes—the diverse array of notes, writings, and other materials upon which researchers base their ethnographies ((Jean E. Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1.))—and the research artifacts, such as transcripts and audio or video recordings, produced from more formal, direct interactions with respondents.\r\n\r\n<b>The Data Sharing Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nFunding agencies—especially agencies administering public funds—are increasingly requiring qualitative research data to be made publically available. Since 1995, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)—a major source of funding for qualitative research in the United Kingdom—has required its awardees to archive their data as a condition of funding. ((See O. Parry and N. S. Mauthner, “Whose Data Are They Anyway?” <i>Sociology</i> 38, no. 1 (2004): 140-41.)) Similarly, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other US funding agencies (e.g. National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities) have begun to require formal data-management plans detailing how researchers will meet data-sharing expectations. Our assumption is that this trend will continue as both public and private funders seek maximum returns on their investment in research. While not always explicitly required, the goal of many of these policies is for research data to be deposited in an appropriate repository with online access for both other researchers and the public. For ethnographers, who are often accustomed to retaining exclusive rights over their fieldnotes and other materials, this can represent an uncomfortable shift in research practice, even when these repositories take into account the particular confidentiality and consent demands inherent to ethnographic research (discussed further below) and implement appropriate safeguards such as embargoing or redacting sensitive materials.\r\n\r\nIn principal, the ethnographic researchers we interviewed for this study saw data preservation and sharing as positive values, even if they were not sure about how to preserve and share data or who would potentially use the materials. When asked about what parts of her research data she would like to preserve, one anthropologist explained:\r\n\r\nThat’s the thing—If you keep anything long enough it becomes interesting. . . . For myself . . . I would love to archive everything and maybe put some kind of time stamp on personal information where it can’t be released for some amount of time. It’s so hard to know what people in the future would be interested in. . . . I try to keep data in such a way that hopefully it would be comprehensible to someone else if they were willing to work through my crazy software. . . . If I had somebody’s fieldnotes from 100 years ago from my field site, I’d be totally fascinated by that, so you never know what people are going to be interested in. (2-16-120211) ((The number in parentheses is the participant identification number; please refer to Table 1.))\r\n\r\nThe scholarly societies to which many of these researchers belong also broadly support data sharing and potential reuse. The most recent 2012 revision on the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) ethics statement explicitly states that it is the obligation of the researcher to preserve records and make results accessible, “Anthropologists have an ethical responsibility for ensuring the integrity, preservation, and protection of their work” and, the “results of anthropological research should be disseminated in a timely fashion” provided it is not “at the expense of protecting confidentiality.” ((American Anthropological Association (AAA), <i>Statement on Ethics: Principals of Professional Responsibility</i>, 2012, <a href=\"http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf\">http://www.aaanet.org/profdev/ethics/upload/Statement-on-Ethics-Principles-of-Professional-Responsibility.pdf</a>.)) The previous 1998 version also addressed data access and preservation, but not as systematically or forcefully. ((This version was slightly revised in 2009 to make minor changes to some of the statement’s language. Since this revision did not alter the structure or main points of the statement, we continue to refer the 1998 version (as does the AAA’s ethics website). American Anthropological Association, Code of Ethics of the American Anthropological Association, Statement, 1998, B.4-5, C1.)) Likewise, the American Sociological Association sets similar expectations in the data sharing section of its Code of Ethics. ((American Sociological Association, Code of Ethics, 1999, 13.05.))\r\n\r\nThe benefits of data archiving and sharing for scholarly disciplines and the advancement of knowledge are straightforward: preserved materials can be subjected to secondary analysis, unnecessary duplication of research can be minimized, historical records can be maintained, and, importantly, scholars can independently evaluate the validity of published results by consulting the primary data. ((Libby Bishop, “Ethical Sharing and Reuse of Qualitative Data,” <i>Australian Journal of Social Issues</i> 44, no. 3 (2009): 266.)) Furthermore, online repositories might enable new forms of scholarship and writing. For the first time, materials preserved and made accessible online have made it feasible to make publically available the corpus of primary texts that form the basis of support for ethnographic argumentation. While a non-digitized, paper-based collection could also serve this purpose, it is unlikely that more than a handful of interested readers of a particular ethnography would physically travel to the repository to examine the documents. Repositories that make resources available online fundamentally change this dynamic. In <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive, </i>Johannes Fabian explores these possibilities by conducting what he describes as an experiment with “writing ethnography ‘in the presence of texts’” located in a publically accessible online repository. ((Johannes Fabian, <i>Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive</i> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), vii.)) Fabian terms this genre of writing “commentary,” a text-centered form of ethnography that assumes his reader can simultaneously consult a primary text for her or himself via an online archive. ((Ibid., 9-13.))\r\n\r\nThe text Fabian utilizes is a conversation he and Kahenga Mukonkwa Michel had about a ceremony Kahenga conducted at Fabian’s home in Zaire in 1974. ((Ibid., 3.)) The transcription, translation, and an audio excerpt of the discussion are now housed in the Archives of Popular Swahili on the website of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa project. ((Johannes. Fabian, “‘Magic and Modernity’: A Conversation with a Herbalist and Practitioner of Magic,” trans. Johannes Fabian, <i>Archives of Popular Swahili</i> 7 (2005), <a href=\"http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction\">http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol7/kahengatext.html#introduction</a>.)) Fabian argues that the repository of documents serves an important epistemological purpose by “mediat[ing] between . . . events, the presentation of evidence, and our aims and claims to produce anthropological knowledge.” ((Fabian, “Magic,” 123.)) By allowing the reader of an ethnography to interrogate and evaluate the primary data on which it is based, the archive reveals how ethnographies are composed through the confrontation between the researcher, his or her respondents, and the texts they co-create. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography</i>, 54. One does wonder, however, why Fabian considered a traditionally published monograph necessary to this project, rather than simply including it in the archive. Given that his book annotates the online texts using paragraph numbers that assume a specific online layout, it would seem more effective to have created hyperlinks between the commentary and the primary materials. In this way, the “experiment” seems incomplete.))\r\n\r\nFabian’s instructive experiment notwithstanding, for many researchers the practice of making ethnographic materials available online is fraught. Ethnography requires researchers to occupy a methodological position that mediates and translates between multiple cultural contexts. This positioning leads to a number of difficulties for ethnographers as they attempt to meet their obligations to multiple constituencies—including funders, cultural institutions, and the researcher’s employing university, in addition to the individuals and communities the researcher works with—while negotiating the processes of placing materials in archives and repositories. When working with human subjects, ethical pitfalls abound, and often ethnographers must resolve contradictions between these groups.\r\n\r\nAt a very basic level, policies requiring access to research data may “directly [contradict] some ethnic groups’ cultural traditions concerning secrecy and controlled access to information.” ((David Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates,” <i>Annual Review of Anthropology</i> 41, no. 1 (2012): 472, doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721. See also G. Isaac, “Whose Idea Was This?: Museums, Replicas, and the Reproduction of Knowledge,” <i>Current Anthropology</i> 52, no. 2 (2011) 211-233.)) For example, an anthropologist might gain access to knowledge that is secret, or restricted for cultural or social reasons. During his fieldwork with the Saramaka, a group in Suriname who descended from escaped African slaves, Richard Price gained knowledge about the “Old-Time People” who experienced the war for liberation from roughly 1680 to 1762. ((Richard Price, <i>First Time: The Historical Vision of an Afro-American People</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 5-6. For additional examples and a discussion of cross-cultural differences in relation to access to knowledge see Nancy J. Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage: CoPAR, Anthropological Records, and the Archival Community,” <i>The American Archivist </i>62 (1999): 285, note 24.)) The Saramaka consider knowledge about this time and these people powerful, dangerous, and restricted. Price struggled with the ethical implications of publishing a book within a different cultural system that uses this knowledge as its primary subject. ((Price, <i>First Time, </i>21-23.)) Price notes that by putting the information in a public document, he potentially “deprives [the] author of control (except perhaps via the language in which [the book] appears) over [his or her] audience.” ((Ibid., 23.)) This problem is compounded exponentially once information is made available online (as Price’s book now is, at least in part, in Google Books) by removing even the physical restrictions of a bound monograph.\r\n\r\nInformation need not be “exotic” to create publishing difficulties for ethnographers. For example, an ethnographer working in a corporate, government, or other institutional setting in the United States might be privy to proprietary or confidential information about a product or service that must be ethically and legally protected. A researcher in environmental engineering explained her process when conducting interviews:\r\n\r\nAnother big concern is confidentiality because I record those conversations, and then there’s kind of an extended period of time in which I allow those who I’ve talked with to redact parts of our conversation if they’ve talked about things they would prefer to remain private. . . I’m talking to several companies about the development and production of their technologies and so there’s some proprietary information that comes up and that’s really the main concern. (5-20-020212)\r\n\r\nIndeed, accidental release of this type of information might put the researcher at as much legal risk as her respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen preparing to preserve ethnographic data, issues of ownership and authorship are also not always straightforward, and it is imperative that researchers communicate and address these potential problems with archivists, data curators, and repository and digital collection managers before depositing ethnographic materials. For example, consent forms for interviews might not clearly state who holds the copyright or who has a license to use the recording or transcripts, potentially leading to confusion over the legal status of these materials and making it more difficult for a researcher to transfer materials to an archives. Intellectual property and copyright are themselves culturally specific concepts, and a legal right to dispose of or deposit materials as a researcher sees fit does not equal an ethical right to do so. The people providing information, the funders, the institution that employs the researcher, and the community in which the researcher works all have a moral interest in the disposition of the data. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 142.)) Parry and Mauthner go so far as to say, “[B]ecause the construction of qualitative data is a joint endeavor between respondent and researcher, both parties should retain authorship/ownership rights over the data,” which creates “practical, legal and ethical implications for archiving and re-use.” ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 141.))\r\n\r\nSome researchers, including Fabian, argue that since ethnographers and their respondents are joint agents in creating ethnographic materials, both parties should be named to acknowledge their contributions. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) However, naming respondents as authors or contributors contradicts an ethnographer’s imperative to protect the confidentiality of their research participants, which is a basic standard required by most Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved research and by professional-ethics statements. While David Zeitlyn observes that “a default assumption that notes will be anonymized conflicts with an individual’s moral right to be recognized as the author of his or her words,” ((Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 470.)) many, if not most, ethnographers would likely be uncomfortable naming their participants in almost any context, but especially in publically accessible online repositories. This is likely to hold true even if a researcher philosophically accepts that his or her authority to determine the level of sensitivity that the data require privileges the researcher’s position vis-à-vis his or her respondents. ((Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 148.))\r\n\r\nMany ethnographers thus understand themselves not so much as owners of their data, but rather as stewards or custodians of data that are produced by a complex set of relationships between researchers and respondents. ((Silverman, “Introduction,” 4-5.)) As the stewards of these data, researchers are often the de facto interpreters of the terms by which data are made available, choosing what and when to publish or deposit materials in repositories or archives. Despite his assertion that correspondents should be named, Fabian notes that he exercises this stewardship by attempting not to publish anything that might be dangerous or damaging to the people with whom he worked—a position that is probably made easier by the fact that the texts he is working with were already 30 years old when he transcribed and posted them on the web. ((Fabian, <i>Ethnography, </i>16-17.)) Many researchers we interviewed adopted a similar “attitude of moral responsibility towards research participants, expressed in the way in which data are handled,” ((Annamaria Carusi and Marina Jirotka, “From Data Archive to Ethical Labyrinth,” <i>Qualitative Research</i> 9, no. 3 (2009): 292.)) citing ethical concerns about appropriate use of the data as well as issues of confidentiality and consent. Even for researchers who support public access to data, these concerns cause them to question funders’ data-sharing requirements. A researcher in education who was preparing to apply for additional funding to create a longitudinal dataset by re-interviewing her previous respondents noted her uncertainty:\r\n\r\nI know that a lot of places when you apply for funding they want eventually for [data] to become public. I haven’t had to deal with it, but I’ve definitely thought about it. . . . I want to make sure to preserve the qualitative data because it’s very important to me . . . so it’s a concern for me personally to save it. . . . [But] once it’s public, or shared between other people, I would like to get help eventually on making the data itself more confidential because they are just interview transcripts which, you know, there are a lot of [confidentiality] issues with that, and that I would have to [make the data itself more confidential] before I shared it. . . . I don’t know if there are limits to the extent to which I can make it public or not. (1-04-100511)\r\n\r\nIn the context of making their data accessible, these confidentiality and consent negotiations are some of the most difficult issues for scholars to resolve before depositing their ethnographic materials in data repositories or archives. These issues are also most effectively addressed as early in a research project as possible, so that researchers can implement the necessary practices and protocols to insure that confidentiality and consent can be assured in the long term prior to data collection. As Charles Humphrey and his colleagues discuss, the integral involvement of archivists and data-curation specialists in the planning stages and throughout qualitative research projects greatly increases the quality of the data products and decreases ethical problems associated with deposition in repositories and archives. ((Charles K. Humphrey, Carole A. Estabrooks, Judy R. Norris, Jane E. Smith, and Kathryn L. Hesketh, “Archivist on Board: Contributions to the Research Team,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000).)) As they point out, this collaboration is beneficial to both researchers and archivists, since good archival preparation practices are often synonymous with good research practices. ((Humphrey et al., “Archivist on Board,” 5.))\r\n\r\nDespite efforts by organizations such as the Council for the Preservation of Anthropological Records (CoPAR) to foster this type of collaboration ((Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage.”)) and educate ethnographers in data curation and archival preparation practices, ((CoPAR has released a series of fourteen bulletins outlining specific issues involved in the preservation of anthropological materials and addressed to practicing anthropologists. These bulletins are available at <a href=\"http://copar.org/bulletins.htm\">http://copar.org/bulletins.htm</a>. Unfortunately, since most of these bulletins were written in the late 1990s, many of the technology discussions are out of date. However, the conceptual discussions remain highly relevant.)) it appears that relatively few ethnographers seek out the assistance of archivists or data management specialists until after data collection is completed, unless funding requirements compelled them to do so. Of the ethnographers we interviewed, only two had consulted with data management services prior to the data collection phase of their research, both as a result of the NSF’s requirement that data-management plans be included in new funding proposals. Only one project had a systematic plan for depositing its ethnographic data in an archives, principally because this research was conducted as part of a very large and well-funded research initiative. This project had amassed some 40,000 pages of ethnographic fieldnotes, which were being preserved but not yet been shared publically. The researcher leading this project explained:\r\n\r\nIt’s news to anthropologists that data should be made public. It’s not something that’s in their mindset. In fact they are appalled by it. . . . However, that [ethnographic] data was paid for using a million dollars of federal money and I’m using it with some of my grad students who are essentially doing secondary analysis of fieldnotes. I think that in the long run that data should be made public, and could be, but very carefully. . . . I don’t think that’s a problem . . . my guess is we’re going to get there. . . . A very new area now is “what do you do with electronic fieldnotes?” and “can those be made available for researchers?” If nothing else, I think this archive of fieldnotes . . .in 20 or 30 years could be a great historical source and should be preserved on that basis. So, I would like to see us work out ways of carefully having anthropological and ethnographic data made public too. (5-11-103011)\r\n\r\nIn working out the procedures for sharing these materials, this researcher went on to emphasize the paramount importance of protecting research participants’ confidentiality. Indeed, all of the ethnographers cited confidentiality concerns as one of the foremost issues that they would need to discuss and resolve with an archivist or repository manager before depositing their materials, making it perhaps the most critical area for developing collaborative practices between researchers, data curators, and archivists.\r\n\r\n<b>The Confidentiality Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nThe ethics statements of both the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association require researchers to protect the confidentiality of their respondents (although the AAA statement asserts that expectations of credit should also be addressed). ((ASA, Code of Ethics, 11; AAA, Statement on Ethics (Part 3), 7.)) Protecting research participants’ confidentiality is routinely an explicit promise within social science research, and is an almost universally assumed requirement of IRBs when reviewing research proposals. Setting aside the research participant’s potential moral right to authorship as discussed above, the nature of ethnographic research often renders the promise of confidentiality problematic, if not outright impossible. As Zachary Schrag observes, maintaining the confidentiality of fieldwork sites and research participants discussed in publications has been a perennial problem for social science researchers, as details necessary to make ethnographic and other fieldwork-based writing meaningful often simultaneously make these places and people identifiable, especially to people familiar with the location or topic. ((Zachary M. Schrag, <i>Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965-2009</i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 15.)) Increasing confidentiality protections almost always come at the cost of decreasing the amount of contextual information included for the ethnography’s audience, and can effectively prevent data from being deposited in an archives or repository (or sometimes even collected). A sociologist recounted the difficulties he encountered on one project:\r\n\r\nI wanted to do life histories with priests [in central Pennsylvania], and part of the problem was . . . we got into a situation where people might tell me things about their personal lives that are sort of not confidential in the IRB sense but that might be upsetting to their congregations—like I talked to one priest who had been married three times, where if the congregation had known about that they would have been very upset. There’s nothing illegal about it; this person’s not shy about telling that, but it could have been damaging. But I had the sense that . . . if I went around and did these interviews, I didn’t want to destroy the data because I thought they had some historical importance. . . . [The IRB said,] “and when you get done with this study if you’re not going to destroy the data you have to store it in an archive for 50 years, and I checked with [university] archives and they said, “we’re not going to store anything like that.” . . . I wanted to preserve the data, but there was no way to do it. . . . I actually quit the project [because the IRB made it impossible to do]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nWhile protecting research participants’ privacy can be difficult, even in carefully prepared and edited publications, the nature of ethnographic materials makes them especially difficult to confidentially preserve over time. Audio and video recordings present obvious confidentiality problems by capturing a respondents’ voice or image,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn36\">[xxxvi]</a> but even interview transcripts can be problematic. A common practice in archiving ethnographic materials is to make attempts to remove potentially identifying information from archived transcripts. However, even these “anonymized” transcripts often still contain personal details that allow the possible identification of research participants. For example, in the interviews conducted for this study, participants regularly discussed their discipline and research interests. Coupled with the names of the universities where the research was conducted—which are contained in all of our research proposals and publications—this seemingly innocuous information would probably render any of our participants identifiable with a simple web search if the full interview transcripts were released. This might not seem like a significant risk for scholars describing projects that they routinely discuss publically, but depending on the other details contained in the transcript it might also be embarrassing or potentially damaging (for example, comments about university administrators, other colleagues, etc.). As is often the case with qualitative research, removing these contextual details would diminish, if not destroy, the usefulness of these data to future researchers—the ostensible audience for these materials. Unfortunately, each piece of contextual detail retained about a research participant to aid in data interpretation simultaneously creates more potential for identification.\r\n\r\nGiven technological advances, removing all conceivably identifying details might still be insufficient to guarantee that transcripts are rendered anonymous. In fact, anonymizing transcripts may soon no longer be technically possible. Arvind Narayana and his colleagues have demonstrated that it is possible to accurately identify anonymous online authors up to 20 percent of the time based on writing style alone, given a sufficient corpus of example texts.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn37\">[xxxvii]</a> As more and more content moves online, one can only assume that these techniques will become more robust, so that identifying a participant from the vocabulary or speech patterns in a transcript may eventually become a matter of applying the correct software. These realities set up even the most well-intentioned researchers to fail to meet the obligations required by IRBs and the agreements made with their respondents.\r\n\r\nWhen archiving ethnographic materials, confidentiality can also be equally important for protecting the researcher. This is especially true for the archiving of fieldnotes, which are profoundly personal for many ethnographic researchers. Researchers are often quite ambivalent about these data, regularly describing feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, or embarrassment about their work and what it reveals about them as scholars.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn38\">[xxxviii]</a> When talking about her data collection process, an anthropologist in our study observed:\r\n\r\nThat’s the thing with fieldnotes, you never show them to anyone . . . as long as it works for you . . . it’s not like you have to show it to someone else and have them make sense of it, which is kind of a shame because it would be nice to have data in formats where people could, you know, sort of, archive that information. (2-16-120211)\r\n\r\nIn his study of fieldnote practices, Jean Jackson observes, “Many respondents point out that the highly personal nature of fieldnotes influences the extent of one’s willingness to share them: ‘Fieldnotes can reveal how worthless your work was, the lacunae, your linguistic incompetence, your not being made a blood brother, your childish temper.’”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn39\">[xxxix]</a> Anthropologist Simon Ottenberg describes his fieldnotes similarly, “[W]hen I was younger, I would have felt uncomfortable at the thought of someone else using my notes, whether I was alive or dead—they are so much a private thing, so much an aspect of personal field experience, so much a private language, so much part of my ego, my childhood [as an anthropologist], and my personal maturity.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn40\">[xl]</a> This attachment and ambivalence may make researchers reluctant to turn over control of their notes to an archives—especially one that has the purpose of making materials available publically on the internet. This professional practice not only makes it very difficult to substantiate or verify ethnographers’ data, suggesting a need for ethnographers to develop more proactive and sensitive data-sharing procedures, but also creates a situation where ethnographic materials are saved, but with inadequate plans for preservation. Zeitlyn notes, “Paradoxically most anthropologists want neither to destroy their field material nor archive it.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn41\">[xli]</a> So, too, with our study: almost no one had made plans for their data beyond the short term, let alone the final dispensation of their materials at the end of their career or after their death.\r\n\r\nWhile archivists regularly assure scholars that the papers of “ordinary” or not-famous researchers are sometimes the most valuable,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn42\">[xlii]</a> researchers themselves are often unconvinced. Many of our respondents had trouble imagining the potential audience for their data and primary materials, although one Environmental Studies researcher shared data on graffiti images she collected during fieldwork following a particular ethnic conflict event. The data were not directly related to her primary research questions, but another scholar used them in a Master’s thesis (and possibly in a future dissertation). Nevertheless, doubts about future usefulness contribute to researchers’ reluctance to undertake sometimes arduous and time-consuming data preservation and annotation tasks, such as redacting confidential information, and to neglect advance planning for the eventual archiving of their materials, such as assuring adequate consent procedures. This is potentially a key area of advocacy for data curators and archivists, who are well positioned to both educate researchers in the importance of preserving primary data for future generations of researchers, even if its immediate value is not apparent, and to provide tools such as cross-indexes and finding aids that make these data more useful and comparable.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn43\">[xliii]</a>\r\n\r\n<b>The Consent Imperative</b>\r\n\r\nBoth IRBs and disciplinary societies’ ethics statements emphasize the importance and necessity of obtaining informed consent from research participants. Given the possibility of archiving materials indefinitely, and especially for web publication, obtaining fully informed consent may be a futile endeavor. Libby Bishop points out that because researchers cannot adequately speculate on all the uses in which data might be employed, explicit consent is “logically impossible.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn44\">[xliv]</a> However, Bishop also observes that this should not paralyze researchers from depositing their materials in archives, since consent for the primary research activity is in itself partial and no researcher can fully explain all information about any research project.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn45\">[xlv]</a> Zeitlyn makes this point in another way, noting that cultural differences may also limit the ability of a researcher to obtain consent in a way that is recognizable to IRBs: “Once material is archived, it may be consulted by unknown others who might use it in novel ways. . . . Can a researcher obtain meaningful prior informed consent if the uses to which the material might be put in the future cannot be explained?”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn46\">[xlvi]</a>\r\n\r\nWhile Bishop suggests responding to this problem by providing examples of how archived research might be reused or by obtaining open-ended consent,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn47\">[xlvii]</a> others suggest a more comprehensive approach that understands consent as a process rather than a one-time event.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn48\">[xlviii]</a> This approach presents significant difficulties when applied to the lifecycle of an entire ethnographic research project, especially once data and other fieldwork materials are deposited in an archives for the purpose of long-term access and preservation. If appropriate consent for archiving is not obtained at the outset of a project, or is sought when new uses are discovered for materials, contacting participants to authorize this usage can be extremely difficult and costly for ethnographers, if not outright impossible. Furthermore, a consent model that requires re-contacting participants also requires confidentiality or anonymization procedures to be reversible, meaning that the researcher must retain records that can link individuals to the materials about them. Retaining contact information or other identifying records is not best practice for assuring participant confidentiality, and in the case of truly sensitive research, doing so unnecessarily maintains records that could be subject to subpoena or otherwise compromised. For example, in 2012 the US Department of Justice issued a subpoena in connection with a murder investigation on behalf of Great Britain for access to oral history interviews conducted with Irish Republican Army and Loyalist paramilitary members as part of “The Belfast Project,” archived at Boston College’s Burns Library. While the project’s confidentiality agreement promised interviewees that these materials would be embargoed until their death, this guarantee was subject to exceptions required by American law; a point that may have been unclear to the research participants. Both Boston College and the researchers are presently contesting the subpoenas, but the initial rulings by a federal district court and the First Circuit Court of Appeals have found that the subpoenas are legal.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn49\">[xlix]</a> As this case demonstrates, whenever identifying information exists, there is a possibility that its disclosure can be compelled. From the point of view of research-participant confidentiality, it is therefore preferable to destroy materials that enable identification or re-contact as soon as possible after research is complete.\r\n\r\nSince anonymization is an all-or-nothing decision that must be irreversible, even for the researcher, if it is to be effective,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn50\">[l]</a> in order to make consent an ongoing process, one must also accept that the data cannot be made fully anonymous. The question then becomes how researchers can meaningfully extend consent decisions to include archives without rendering them unmanageable for their administrators or unnecessarily diminishing their analytical value.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn51\">[li]</a> Balancing the need to maintain appropriate levels of confidentiality with the administrative costs is a critical area for collaboration between researchers, archivists, and data specialists. Fully anonymizing datasets is probably neither necessary, nor cost effective, for relatively low-risk materials,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn52\">[lii]</a> but both the researcher and the archivists must fully understand the potential risk scenarios before these decisions can be made, particularly in an environment where privacy protections are an increasing concern for research participants. While discussing the challenges he faces in complying with funder’s public access requirements, a sociologist observed:\r\n\r\nClearly the biggest problem is the problem of protection of privacy. The concern of privacy has been ramped up tremendously over the last 10 or 15 years, and the process of getting permission to analyze data can be difficult, but a trend in social science data is to include more and more information that\'s sensitive. . . . I think the field is trying to now establish appropriate levels of protection for particular kinds of data and is trying to balance this problem of privacy with public access. And it is a challenge and it’s going to require some new modes of doing things. (5-11-103111)\r\n\r\nDeveloping these modes of work and processes of consent requires not only the participation of researchers and scholarly societies, but also intensive cooperation with data management specialists, technologists, and archivists.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn53\">[liii]</a>\r\n\r\n<b>Conclusions and Recommendations</b>\r\n\r\nResearchers and archivists alike face tremendous challenges in effectively preserving ethnographic research data and providing meaningful access for researchers and other stakeholders while simultaneously protecting sensitive data. In order to be effective, data sharing, confidentiality, and consent imperatives all require the active participation and investment of researchers themselves. Decisions about access, issues of authorship attribution, adequate consent, and the level of confidentially required cannot be made without the input of someone who is deeply knowledgeable about the contexts in which the research took place. However, as we have seen, none of these decision processes necessarily end at the moment when the materials are deposited in an archives or repository, and a researcher’s ethical obligation to his or her research participants does not end once he or she has transferred responsibility for their preservation. This sense of responsibility makes many researchers reluctant to relinquish control over their ethnographic materials, lest changing political, social, or cultural conditions necessitates a more restrictive approach to data access than was initially required.\r\n\r\nFor example, an Environmental Studies researcher noted that currently her data does not present much risk to her respondents:\r\n\r\nMost of the data I’ve collected really have limited privacy issues or any kind of harm that could come to respondents. There are some topics that I’ve looked at, that depending on, when—you know, timeliness—at what point these were published, that identifying information could be problematic. In [central Asian country] it’s a lot easier—at least currently—the situation for my topics isn’t dangerous. That doesn’t mean it can’t be in the future and if I extended the research to neighboring countries then I would probably have some more serious confidentiality issues. (2-12-111011)\r\n\r\nIf the political situation for her respondents changed, however, this researcher might be ethically obligated to change the access conditions of any materials that she had archived, even if her consent procedures had addressed this eventuality. Repositories for ethnographic materials must be careful to include procedures to respond to these types of situations in their donor agreements, and researchers should discuss the unique qualities of ethnographic materials prior to their deposit. As Parezo points out, “it is unethical and unreasonable to expect the archival community to guess which fieldnotes contain sensitive information and what are reasonable use restrictions.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn54\">[liv]</a>\r\n\r\nUnfortunately, preparing materials for deposit into an archives is often a low priority for ethnographers for a variety of reasons, and the archiving of ethnographic data is further hindered by a persistent lack of training. While comprehensive historical review is beyond the scope of this article, Silverman already noted the problem of a lack of formal training in data collection and management practices among anthropologists almost 20 years ago,<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn55\">[lv]</a> before the rise of many of the complications that the expansion of digital data collection created. Almost none of the scholars we interviewed reported that data curation or stewardship training was part of their graduate curriculum, and data management was usually only addressed narrowly in relation to methodological approaches and problems. The ethical and practical difficulties involved in managing and preserving large amounts of research data were rarely addressed, with most researchers acquiring the skills they needed via trial and error.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn56\">[lvi]</a> None of the scholars interviewed during this study expressed satisfaction with their level of expertise in data management, and few had access to individuals who could provide knowledgeable guidance. While it would be preferable for graduate curricula to include this type of training, it seems unlikely that this change will occur in the near term. It is, therefore, likely that archivists and data specialists will need to provide this training, preferably by developing relationships with ethnographic researchers as early as possible in the research process.\r\n\r\nThe lack of confidence in their data-management training compounds researchers’ apprehension about the ethical issues contained in their data. Researchers are naturally—and rightfully—conservative about the potential risks in sharing data, especially if they are not convinced they can protect their respondents’ confidentiality, or that they have obtained appropriate consent—issues that the difficulties of cross-cultural communication make more complex. Without such assurances that these ethical imperatives can be addressed, many researchers are unlikely to invest in archiving their materials. “In many cases, their desire to avoid the ethical risks of inappropriate data release may outweigh the costs of potential data loss.”<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn57\">[lvii]</a>\r\n\r\nBecause of these interrelated concerns, it is critical that the archival and data curation systems available to ethnographic researchers have multiple and fine-grained levels of access and privacy controls. Tools must be developed that can appropriately manage confidential data and that allow researchers, working in conjunction with their respondents, to exercise control over their data, administer who has access to it, and account for culturally specific restrictions on data use.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn58\">[lviii]</a> One example of a system attempting to address these requirements is the Murkutu content management system (<a href=\"http://www.mukurtu.org/\">http://www.mukurtu.org/</a>), which makes cultural protocols a fundamental part of access to materials. This allows for the easy creation of fine-grained and culturally appropriate user groups with specifically defined usage rights, and it is being developed in cooperation with indigenous communities.<a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn59\">[lix]</a>\r\n\r\nBecause the nature of ethnographic materials makes them potentially subject to ongoing and evolving dilemmas of confidentiality and consent, archivists and data managers should understand that these materials may require ongoing curation, preferably through processes and procedures that incorporate researchers in a collaborative and meaningful way. Although many researchers would welcome the ability to more easily share their data, particularly in collaborative projects and in response to data-sharing requirements, they are almost universally resistant to any arrangement in which they would relinquish control over access to the data. As one anthropologist described:\r\n\r\nPeople don’t hesitate, at all, to share data with collaborators that they trust. … If you provide a mechanism for collaboration, even if it’s just Google Docs or something, you know, people share data easily and freely. It’s when it becomes an anonymous process that they seem to get balky. (1-02-100511)\r\n\r\nThe goal of making materials publically available online, then, will require archival systems and processes that are cognizant of the complex social relationships embedded within ethnographic materials, not only between the researcher and his or her respondents, but also between and among the many stakeholders in ethnographic data. The development of additional policies, ethical guidelines, and best practices by disciplinary organizations, funding agencies, universities, and cultural institutions could further aid researchers and archivists in navigating the ethical dilemmas contained in the archival process.\r\n\r\nBecause much ethnographic data is collected by individuals in relatively small and often idiosyncratic datasets, it is especially vulnerable to loss due to benign neglect or lack or resources, even if the data are historically unique. A sociologist described one such vulnerable dataset:\r\n\r\nWe did life histories of 45 people in a [church] congregation in [central Pennsylvania town]. . . . It’s probably the only body of material on a single congregation of that depth and complexity that exists, and I’m just too lazy to have figured out what to do with it and write it up and everything, but you could imagine somewhere somebody who wants to do research on congregations would find this incredibly valuable. But what’s going to happen to it [in the long term]? And what’s going to happen to it is, the copies I have will end up in a trash can, and my computer hard drive will eventually crash or get outmoded or get erased, and that’ll be the end of it [if there isn’t a place to archive it]. (2-13-111411)\r\n\r\nIn order to prevent these losses, data management specialists and archivists must specifically curate these materials. They must also build relationships with ethnographers to resolve the unique ethical dilemmas these data present and the uneasy tensions between researchers’ desire to share data publically and obligations to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the individuals and communities they study.\r\n\r\nFinally, despite the acknowledged importance and value of archival materials to the disciplines and future researchers, academic rewards systems offer very little payoff for the work that goes into making ethnographic materials available, and ethnographic researchers are often under-resourced in the funding, time, and personnel support needed for preparing materials for archiving. <a title=\"\" href=\"#_edn60\">[lx]</a> Archivists must therefore work to make archival systems and the development of archival processes and policies as straightforward for researchers as possible, ideally assisting in integrating the development of metadata and other secondary materials (for example, codebooks, explanatory materials, finding aids, and ontologies) necessary to archiving and ensuring the long-term usefulness of primary data as early in the research process as possible. Likewise, funding agencies should improve funding for long-term data management, preservation, and curatorial services, either directly or via guidelines to institutions for recouping indirect costs, especially when the grant mandates archiving or public data accessibility. By providing these supports, archivists and funders would greatly assist researchers in responding to the imperatives of providing access to data and assuring the confidentiality and consent of their respondents, as well as resolving the ethical dilemmas contained in their data, thereby helping assure the preservation of irreplaceable ethnographic information.\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<hr align=\"left\" size=\"1\" width=\"33%\" />\r\n\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref36\">[xxxvi]</a> For a discussion of the extreme difficulty of archiving video and audio data anonymously, see Louise Corti, Annette Day, and Gill Backhouse, “Confidentiality and Informed Consent: Issues for Consideration in the Preservation of and Provision of Access to Qualitative Data Archives,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 4.4c, <a href=\"http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024\">http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1024</a>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref37\">[xxxvii]</a> A. Narayanan, H. Paskov, N. Z. Gong, J. Bethencourt, E. Stefanov, E. C. R. Shin, and D. Song, “On the Feasibility of Internet-scale Author Identification,” Security and Privacy (SP), 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 20-23, 2012): 301, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6234420.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref38\">[xxxviii]</a> Jackson, “I Am a Fieldnote,” 10-12.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref39\">[xxxix]</a> Ibid., 22.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref40\">[xl]</a> Simon Ottenberg, “Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text,” in <i>Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology</i>, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1990), 153.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref41\">[xli]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref42\">[xlii]</a> Catherine Fowler, \"Ethical Considerations,\" in Silverman and Parezo, <i>Preserving the Anthropological Record</i>, 64-65; Robert Leopold, “The Second Life of Ethnographic Fieldnotes,” <i>Ateliers d\'anthropologie</i> 32 (2008): 4.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref43\">[xliii]</a> Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 301-305. See also Louise Corti, “Progress and Problems of Preserving and Providing Access to Qualitative Data for Social Research—The International Picture of an Emerging Culture,” <i>Forum: Qualitative Social Research</i> 1, no. 3 (2000): 10.1.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref44\">[xliv]</a> Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref45\">[xlv]</a> Ibid., 264.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref46\">[xlvi]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471; see also Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 147.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref47\">[xlvii]</a> Bishop, “Ethical Sharing,” 263.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref48\">[xlviii]</a> Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294; Parry and Mauthner, “Whose Data,” 146; AAA, Code of Ethics, III.A.4.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref49\">[xlix]</a> The Society of American Archivists Oral History Section maintains a webpage summarizing the case and providing links to relevant documents at http://www2.archivists.org/groups/oral-history-section/the-belfast-case-information-for-saa-members.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref50\">[l]</a> Zeitlyn, “Anthropology in and of the Archives,” 471.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref51\">[li]</a> See Carusi and Jirotka, “From Data Archive,” 294-95.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref52\">[lii]</a> See Corti, Day, and Backhouse,\" Confidentiality and Informed Consent,\" 4.4, on the expense of creating anonymized archives.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref53\">[liii]</a> ICPSR’s “Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving Phase 5: Preparing Data for Sharing” provides a model for these processes. See <a href=\"http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html\">http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/deposit/guide/chapter5.html</a>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref54\">[liv]</a> Parezo, “Preserving Anthropology’s Heritage,” 285.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref55\">[lv]</a> Silverman, “Introduction,” 6.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref56\">[lvi]</a> Jahnke, Asher, and Keralis, <i>The Problem of Data</i>.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref57\">[lvii]</a> Ibid.<i>,</i> 17.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref58\">[lviii]</a> Ibid.<i>,</i> 17-18.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref59\">[lix]</a> A list of community groups and organizations participating in the Mukurtu project is available at http://www.mukurtu.org/community.html.\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n<div>\r\n\r\n<a title=\"\" href=\"#_ednref60\">[lx]</a> The NSF’s recent decision to list datasets as one of the research products to be included in the section of its grant proposals where researchers describe their qualifications does suggest, however, that the current rewards system may gradually be changing (see <a href=\"http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp\">http://nsf.gov/pubs/policydocs/pappguide/nsf13001/gpg_sigchanges.jsp</a>).\r\n\r\n</div>\r\n</div>','Curating the Ethnographic Moment','','inherit','open','open','','4698-revision-12','','','2013-06-17 23:40:54','2013-06-17 23:40:54','',4698,'http://dev.archivejournal.net/issue//uncategorized/4698-revision-12/',0,'revision','',0),