As I was thinking about the topic this week, I couldn't help but marvel at how much it easier it is for us, citizens of the digital age, to preserve research artefacts compared to our predecessors. In the era of cloud computing, I can not only back up copies of papers, interview transcripts, audio and video recordings, post-it notes (basically anything documenting my thought process and research methodology for future analysis and and replication) on a local machine disk but on a number of cloud + social services (Dropbox, Google Drive, Mendeley/academia.eu for building an academic profile and sharing papers, documents etc.). I can collaborate with peers on these services and make various kinds of content public/private. The hope is that my research legacy will live on through these services and on the day I publish something (hopefully? :P), in journal archives and libraries.
I think I would make it a point to use videos/photos to capture the various phases of a research project: brainstorming, information gathering and research, interviews/other ethnographic methods and of course, the final research product. As the site of my research is an actual MOOC (hosted on a MOOC provider), I would need to preserve records of the actual course taking experience (i.e. data around module completion, quiz/test scores, content viewing metrics etc.) which I would need to elicit from the MOOC platform I'm using to carry out my research.
I think what is most important is preserving all documentation around the actual methodology and context the research endeavour is rooted in; so that whoever is studying or referencing the work in the future has a thorough understanding of the motivations/sensibilities of the researchers and is able to replicate, or at the very least simulate, the major components of the experiment. The hope is that this digital material will endure changing formats over the years and I think the more people that have access to your work, the greater the chance of it lasting the test of time.
I think I would make it a point to use videos/photos to capture the various phases of a research project: brainstorming, information gathering and research, interviews/other ethnographic methods and of course, the final research product. As the site of my research is an actual MOOC (hosted on a MOOC provider), I would need to preserve records of the actual course taking experience (i.e. data around module completion, quiz/test scores, content viewing metrics etc.) which I would need to elicit from the MOOC platform I'm using to carry out my research.
I think what is most important is preserving all documentation around the actual methodology and context the research endeavour is rooted in; so that whoever is studying or referencing the work in the future has a thorough understanding of the motivations/sensibilities of the researchers and is able to replicate, or at the very least simulate, the major components of the experiment. The hope is that this digital material will endure changing formats over the years and I think the more people that have access to your work, the greater the chance of it lasting the test of time.
Hi Akash,
ReplyDeleteGreat post, you listed several - not only digital - useful preservation methods. To complement your assertion that "the more people that have access to your work, the greater the chance of it lasting the test of time", for digital records in particular, I think correct classification and categorization using relevant keywords can help a great deal in making sure that your work gets into the hands of the right people.
Proper search engine optimization (SEO), when dealing with work published on the web for example, will ensure that users get access to your material using the right combination of keywords via search engines through the years.
Cheers,
Sam