How does the treatment of humanities data differ from science data?" -It’s an interesting sort of tension, because in the sciences a lot of the conversation around documentation focuses on the notion of reproducibility in research. But that sort of paradigm doesn’t always map to the humanities. One of [the researchers at UCSB] brought up the notion of repeatability. It’s not necessarily that another researcher should be able to reproduce your exact results, but that whatever you’re describing, someone else should be able to do that [via their own path]. So it’s helping [researchers] understand how to document their process, the transformations, communicate the choices that they’ve made in manipulating the data or creating a certain type of resource so it’s understandable by other people, and helping them weigh some of the factors that might affect their argument. An additional component is considering what needs to be done to make that data continue to have value after a particular project. It’s a natural line from the documentation angle to discussion about metadata and file format sustainability, and selection of repositories that provide persistent access.
Thomas Padilla, UCSB’s Inaugural Humanities Data Curator
By Lisa Peet
