At LIBER’s Annual Conference this June, Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra from DARIA-EU (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) presented on data management best practices for humanities researchers, and shared a collaborative Google Doc outlining those recommendations.
The Google Doc, “Data management resources for arts and humanities research,” exists to be a curated source for resources relevant to encouraging solid data management practices in the arts and humanities. The resources in the document include videos, tools, referrals to organizations, short articles, and training materials. Information about how to use the resources and apply them to managing research data is included throughout the document to bring context to the resources.
Because discussing data collection and management in the humanities is a relatively new topic and approach to research for humanities scholars to consider, Toth-Czifra made sure to include a complete section on an introduction to data in the arts and humanities, such as the data types that arts and humanities researchers might encounter and training modules specifically for arts and humanities scholars. She then provides resources for each aspect and stage of a research project: choosing sustainable file formats during the research process, making data easily shareable with others, creating a data management plan (DMP) and suggesting an online tool for writing a DMP, and including data with publications as well as publishing data sets in journals specifically for data papers. In this document, Toth-Czifra recommends using DMP Online to write data management plans; however, we at UW-Madison have an institutional membership with DMPTool, and recommend campus members to use the campus tool to create and request feedback on their DMPs from RDS consultants.
The document is intended to be collaborative: anyone with resources to share and that would enrich it are encouraged to add comments and suggestions. It is made available with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, so people are able to share and redistribute it, as well as adapt it for any purpose.