In this project, we invite researchers from across the University of Warwick to work with us to further develop and enhance practices of data curation that advance the goals of open interpretative research.

The call to 'open up' our data can be heard all around, as part of a wider drive across sectors to make knowledge more accessible, usable and engaging. While these wider objectives are shared by many, the sciences have historically provided the models for what 'open data' means in practice. Open data guidelines and tools tend to be designed with quantitative methods in mind.

Against this backdrop, this research culture project asks: what are the benefits of openness for intepretative research? What practical strategies of data curation can help us realise these benefits? What kind of data infrastructures, data practices and data cultures are needed to enable open inquiry in the humanities and social sciences? What forms of data stewardship - what cultures of data curation - can help us take open inquiry to the next level?

To answer these questions, this project puts the data needs of qualitative researchers at Warwick on centre stage. By inviting researchers from across the University to submit their own data sets to our project, we will be able to adopt a case-based approach and work with them to develop strategies of data stewardship in open inquiry that suit the needs of qualitative research.

COVID-19 App Store and Data Flow Ecologies

Drawing from an interdisciplinary set of ‘multi-situated’ app methods at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, this project investigate corona virus apps as media ecological artefacts. In doing so, we mapped the capacities of apps by cycling them through different socio-technical settings to address specific questions developed in dialogue with recent work on the platform economy, software infrastructure and data critique. A published article is available here.

Found Sound

Digital Love in the Time of Covid

Carolina Bandinelli

Digital Love in the Time of Covid is a study on the digital culture of love during coronavirus restrictions. The project deployed a qualitative research framework including focus groups and interviews to explore the affective investment that dating app attract and the symbolic practices they produce, in a context when meeting another person is perceived as difficult and risky, when not altogether forbidden. The project’s findings suggest that the pandemic has accelerated two interconnected processes: the emergence of dating as a dimension deprived of sensual and romantic connotations, and the experience of digital media as erotic objects in themselves.

CDI member Justin Tackett and Senior Research Software Engineer James Tripp collaborated a prototype and mini project.

Intertitles

In the Title Cards project a prototype website was created to present title cards from silent films. We used the Tropy desktop application to annotate a set of title cards and then upload these to Omeka S, which offer excellent support for sector wide metadata standards and allows the researcher to create an online exhibit.

Prototype to be published soon...

The "Speaker"

The word evolution project examined words referring to the "speaker" in the text. Research software engineers helped identify and analyse historic texts containing "speaker"-related terms using the Gale Scholar Lab. Further analysis using the prosodic library written in Python to better understand these texts by inferring the meter of prose. Our work demonstrated the impact of large corpus analysis tools such as Gale Scholar Lab.

Dante’s Transnational Female Public in the Long Nineteenth Century

CDI member Frederica Coluzzi and Senior Research Software Engineer James Tripp are collaborating on this project.

The Dante’s Female Public is in active development. Using the Omeka S platform, the project presents information about female authors who have written about Dante, the libraries where their works can be found and associated information. The website includes a map of showing the location of libraries and the number of works these contain. In addition, a map of library locations in Italy was created and released on the github platform (source codeLink opens in a new window, map websiteLink opens in a new window).