Sound Data Management Training

h1. DataTrain

(return to [[WP1_1_Research_Of_Available_Resources]])

DataTrain for "archaeology":http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/learning/DataTrain and for "social anthropology":http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/dataman/datatrain/socanthintro.html

* DataTrain: research data managmeent training modules in Social Anthropology ("Jorum":http://dspace.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/15994)

* DataTrain: research data managmeent training modules in Archaeology ("Jorum":http://dspace.jorum.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/15992)

h2. Archaeology

Licensed CC-BY-NC-SA

Structure of course:

bq. Modules:

# Creating and managing research data in archaeology: an overview

# Data lifecycles and management plans

# Working with digital data

# Rights and digital data

# E-Theses and supplementary digital data

# Archiving digital data

# Post-Graduate data management plans

# Project and professional data: data management on post-doctoral research projects and beyond

bq. The teaching modules were run as a trial course in March 2011, as part of a post-graduate course in Digital Skills for Dissertation and Publications, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge. The data management course comprised 4 x 2 hour sessions:

# Creating and Managing Data - Defining post-graduate research data

# Working with Digital Data

File structure, naming, and formats

E-theses and supplementary digital data

Post-Graduate Data Management Plans

# Project and Professional Data

Data management for larger research projects

# Archiving and Re-using Data

Depositing digital data

Intellectual Property Rights and research data

bq. The slides and notes have been kept as simple and as straight forward as possible. They are not meant to be exhaustive in the information they contain. Rather, they provide an overview of the general issues regarding data management.

bq. Each module has been designed to take approximately 30 minutes to complete. Six of the eight presentations have between 10 and 16 slides (including front title and end acknowledgement slides). The two longer modules are Module 3: Working with Digital Data; and Module 8: Project and Professional Data.

bq. Module 3 (Working with Digital Data) has 38 slides many of which contain a lot of information on different file types and formats. This information has been summarised from the Archaeology Data Service’s Guides to Good Practice, and content most relevant to post-graduate students is presented in a straight forward way. Rather that spending an hour presenting Module 3 in detail (and boring the students to death), it is suggested that the slides be presented as a ‘lightening tour’ of the practical issues of working with digital data. The slides can then be made available for future reference by the students as a handout.

bq. Module 8 (Project and Professional Data) provides an introduction into data management at a higher level of research, including writing AHRC Technical Appendices. While this can be run as a stand alone session, given that this is the desired career path of many doctoral students, and the fact that many doctoral students carry out their research as part of larger projects, the aim of the module is to round off the post-graduate course by looking forward beyond the submission of a PhD Thesis. 

Comments ergarding discipline-spceific natuer (from notes for part 1 of course):

bq. Can archaeology be considered in any way a special case in terms of how we create, manage, and archive digital data?

The simple answer is no. The issues of how best to manage digital data and safeguard it preservation in the long term are broadly the same across all disciplines.

The same goes for individual archaeological projects. Even though some might think that their own project is a special case in terms of complicated digital data, or for the fact that they will produce very little in the way of digital data, at the heart of it, the same issues apply, just on a larger or smaller scale.

A key issue which does vary from discipline to discipline is that of what are private data and what are public data. This does arise in archaeology particularly in regard to sensitive data of site or artefact locations, or sensitive personal data collected during the course of a research project.

What perhaps sets archaeology apart from other disciplines is the appreciation of the historical significance of what we do. And the fact that very often, the practice of archaeology is a destructive process and the physical and digital data obtained represent a unique archive – an experiment that cannot be repeated.