From a joint workshop among 5 projects to employing an online brainstorming application called Mural.ly, the research data spring project teams have been applying creative ways to engage their communities. If you wonder what else they have been up to, see the short updates below. And if you would like to participate at the London sandpit workshop on 13-14 July, please get in touch with me.
| Project details | Update |
| DMAOnline – RDM Administration Analytics
Masud Khokhar, Lancaster University |
We have now completed the backend of the first phase of the application (the data model) and have written a blog post about this. We have also organised a partner/community workshop for our project and to make it more attractive, have invited other RDS projects from the area to join us. See Eventbrite for details and registration. We are now working on the front-end side of the things, i.e. looking at EPrints APIs and CSV import into our dashboard. We also informally spoke about our platform at the Pure UG meeting in May. |
| Enabling Complex Analysis of Large Scale Digital Collections
Melissa Terras, University College London Blog; Website; Project plan |
We’ve had another team meeting, and have things working! We’re now looking at optimising the search across the corpus, and working with our academics to run their searches. We have two days planned in a few weeks where the whole team will chime in and work on searching and visualising research – full steam ahead! |
| Develop a DataVault
Stuart Lewis, University of Edinburgh Blog team meeting; Blog storage; Blog packaging; Project plan |
The month two project meeting has now taken place to review the work from month 1 (use cases, metadata requirements, storage options) and to refine the design of the Data Vault system. Month two will now work on selecting technologies and architecture, ready for the month three hackathon where we’ll work together in early June to code the first Data Vault proof of concept system! |
| Filling the Digital Preservation Gap
Jenny Mitcham, University of York Blog; Website; Project plan |
Both York and Hull have started testing Archivematica and after a couple of minor technical hiccups have got their first transfers through the system. We have also been collecting sample data from researchers to help improve the identification of research data in digital preservation tools. |
| Collaboration for Research Enhancement by Active Metadata
Simon Coles, University of Southampton Blog; Website; Project plan |
Held first face to face meeting with all partners over 2 days. Established scope and approach to the project. Project Plan fully drafted and made available. Blog site construction well underway. |
| Artivity (former “Use Semantic Desktop to Capture Contextual Research Data”)
Athanasios Velios, University of the Arts London |
We have had a number of video conferencing meetings on a weekly basis. We also had a face-to-face meeting in Germany. Inkscape has been extended to provide the bridge to zeitgeist to store the recorded data. We have identified a number of metrics which we can use on Inkscape to measure tacit qualities of the digitally produced artwork. We have confirmed two volunteers students (graphics design and textile design) to test the platform for us. The agreement is nearly signed and the project document is being developed. We can also now make Artivity tools available over a ppa repository for Ubuntu Linux which makes installation very simple. We have developed a number of ideas for exporting and visualising the data collected. |
| Software Reuse, Repurposing and Reproducibility
Ian Gent, University of St Andrews Blog; Website; Project plan |
Regular Skype meetings have shaped the outputs. First draft of the recommendations document progressing. Arranged project meeting in St Andrews for 3/4 June. Agreed to speak at DataCite meeting on 6th July |
| Unlocking the UK’s Thesis Data through Persistent Identifiers
Stephen Grace, University of East London Blog; Website; Project plan |
Survey completed, interviews for UEL and Southampton case studies completed, three further case studies arranged for next fortnight. Survey analysis and more details will be released soon, just follow our blog. |
| Clipper: Enhancing Time-based Media for Research
John Casey, City of Glasgow College Blog; Website; Project plan |
Regular project meetings and discussions via skype and f2f. We have created an early prototype and screen movie to help illustrate the concepts – going live shortly. Have had some useful meetings with the BBC, OU Geography and Leeds that are leading to some interesting collaborative opportunities. About to launch our demo site and start contacting people / organisations for feedback and interest. |
| Giving Researchers Credit for their Data
Neil Jefferies, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford Blog; Website; Project plan |
Two surveys (one for respositories and one for publishers) based on an outline of the API operation are being circulated. Expect to see one in an inbox near you! Neil Jefferies will be presenting the project at the DataVerse Community Group Meeting in Harvard in early June. Josh Brown of ORCID will introduce it to the THOR Group at the kick-off meeting for us (Thanks Josh!). |
| Access Methods for Analysing Sensitive Data – AMASED
Becca Wilson, University of Bristol Blog; Website; Project plan |
We have investigated integration of the cleaning tool in DataSHIELD. We have received test data from F1000 Research and are defining models of DataSHIELD infrastructure for application with them. |
| Open Source Database-as-a-service with Data Publishing
James Wilson, University of Oxford Blog; Website; Project plan |
Process of open-sourcing the ORDS software is now planned and initial responses sent to interested collaborators. |
| Extending OPD to cover RDM
Joy Davidson, University of Edinburgh Blog; Website; Project plan |
Ongoing work to define the basic infrastructure components for the new RDM OPD profile. We are looking at the light-touch survey that was issued by EPSRC in late May for a steer on elements we’re including. We had planned to run a workshop as part of the OPD pilot, but have been contacted by Masud Khokhar with a suggestion of running a joint workshop instead. This seems a very sensible approach to minimise the costs and fatigue of the RDM community being targeted by the range of RDS projects. The workshop will take place at the University of Lancaster on June 22nd. We will present the draft RDM profile for input at the workshop and will aim to circulate the draft a week prior to the event to the participants and more widely. |
| Sound Matters: a Framework for Use and Reuse of Sound
Ximena Alarcon, University of the Arts London Website; Blog; Get involved; Project plan |
We have completed 16 interviews with key scholars and practitioners who work with field recordings, speech and archives. We have also received advice from Researchers from Universities that work with Audio Retrieval such as University Pompeu Fabra, Queen Mary University of London, and University of Surrey. We have brought all these experiences in an Online Gathering launched on the 20th of May, as a strategy to build the Community of Sound Matters Framework, and receive more contributions. The gathering takes place on the blog, where we invite people to comment, and on Mural.ly, where we have the new structured framework. We are preparing the co-design workshop. |
| A Consortial Approach to Building an Integrated RDM System – “Small and Specialist”
Carlos Silva, University for the Creative Arts Blog; Website; Project plan |
The seminar entitled ‘Working with Eprints to implement an open source approach to RDM in the visual arts’ took place on 14 May with representatives from CREST institutions, RDIVA partners, the Royal College of Arts and Tim Crane from Digirati (who presented on the progress they have made on the ‘Universal Viewer’); Carlos Silva and Dr Alisa Miller presented a summary of this discussion with some specifications on updates to the Kultur plugin, and initial results from the CREST Research Leads Survey on RDM at a seminar hosted by UAL’s ‘Communities of Practice’ group on 19th May. Leeds Trinity University continue their testing of a streamlined implementation of PURE, and are currently in the build stage of the institutional portal, having manually inputted legacy data; ULCC have also set up a test environment for the group. |
| Streamlining deposit: OJS to Repository Plugin
Ernesto Priego, City University London Blog and one more blog; Website; Project plan; @StreamDepo |
We’ve had another team-meeting, and we set up a project management tool for collaboration. We have completed an OJS Journal Management System’s “re-skin” to enhance the usability of the platform and selected journal. We will continue work on the development of the plugin for figshare. We have also filled out a CSREC ethics form and produced an informed consent form and participant information sheet to gather user requirements on the submission process. We will present the project at the PKP Publishing conference in August in Vancouver. A time-consuming part of the process is internal research administration and ensuring payment of the development part via our institution and this has taken important time resources. You can follow our updates on @StreamDepo. |
We recently also published a guest blog post from the British Library’s Rachael Kotarski, who briefly talked about DOIs and how these have been incorporated in some of the research data spring projects above.
Thank you everyone for the great work so far! We have one last update coming up before the sandpit workshop in July. If you are interested and would like to get involved, please get in touch and do follow the projects on their blogs or sign up to our JiscMail list: JISC-RESEARCHDATASPRING@jiscmail.ac.uk!