Welcome to Love Data Week. Every year, research data professionals from libraries, data repositories, and other organizations celebrate great ways to use data and best practices in taking care of research data. You can find lots of us tweeting using #LoveData20 or #LoveDataWeek. At QDR, we’re celebrating this year by releasing our first software tool for researchers, the R package archivr (pronounced “archiver”).
In a recent “Dear Colleague Letter”, the National Science Foundation (NSF) encourages researchers to adopt best practices in managing research data. NSF frequently uses “DCLs” to make researchers aware of funding priorities and preferred practices, so if you are thinking of applying for NSF funding, you should pay close attention to such pronouncements.
When QDR adopted the Dataverse platform in early 2017, one of our goals was to improve the software, development primarily with quantitative data in mind, for qualitative data and the researchers using it. A little more than one year into using Dataverse software at QDR, we have made significant strides in this direction. Here is a quick overview of some of our biggest additions. I also talk about some of these in the video below.
On November 7, Sebastian Karcher, QDR's associate director, and Dessi Kirilova, our curation specialist, hosted a webinar providing deep insights into QDR's curation process based on two data projects. Around sixty participants attended live and many others inquired about a recording. The recording of the webinar is now available on YouTube.
By Colin Elman and Diana Kapiszewski
We are excited to announce the first round of published projects from our Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) Initiative. ATI creates a digital overlay on top of articles generated through qualitative and multi-method research published on journal web pages. That overlay connects specific passages of text to author-generated annotations.
Over the last year, QDR has been working hard to update both its infrastructure and repository catalog. We are proud to report a significant milestone in this ongoing project, the switching of all of our systems over to a new site that incorporates much of this considerable effort. While some of the changes will be immediately noticeable to regular visitors to the site, others are ‘under the hood.’ Here are some of the biggest improvements and changes for our users.
QDR was very saddened to learn that, after a valiant struggle with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Tom Carsey passed away on February 21, 2018. As Director of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, Tom was a distinguished leader in the data services community, committed to helping social scientists share their data, and render their research more rigorous and transparent. While an untiring advocate of the Odum Institute, Tom was also unfailingly kind to other individuals and institutions traveling along the same road.
Meet QDR's fuzzy and beautiful mascot, Data the capybara:
Data (unsurprisingly given her name) got so inspired by #lovedata18 that she composed a whole ode for the occasion and asked us to share it, which we are all too happy to do: