Research Data and Research Data Management (RDM)) have been a major topic in the natural sciences for some time now, but it recently also gained traction in the humanities and social sciences, and in media studies in particular. The growing importance of digital infrastructures such as the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and the demands of funding organizations to include a RDM concept in project proposals is strongly contributing to this development. With sources, methods, and publications becoming digital, more and more research data is being produced, used, and discussed. It is far from obvious what constitutes research data in media studies, thus the discipline needs to have a broad discussion about its own relation to the concept. With its own disciplinary approach of reflexively examining the mediality, materiality, and performativity of the media that constitute research data in the first place, media studies can contribute to a critical understanding of the concept, its uses and its inherent problems. At the same time, some areas of media studies are already invested in formalized research data management: in social media research for example, comprehensive datasets are widely being collected and worked upon, while parts of film studies have shown interest in methods adapted from digital humanities. Within media studies, ‘research data’ raises a number of questions: first, media researchers have to find pragmatic ways and learn how to deal with expectations of standardization, storage, findability and interoperability defined by funding agencies and broader guidelines for publicly funded research. Second, the quest for such formalized ways of creating, processing and representing ‘data’ also confronts the discipline (once again) with conceptual and critical questions about the mediality of data, its discourses and materialities. Third, we as Open Media Studies SIG believe that openness (i.e. open research data) should be a major guiding principle and quality in the configuration of contemporary research data in media studies.
The SIG aims to further discuss:
- understandings of research data in the humanities and qualitative social sciences
- productive ways to think about ‘open research data’ within media studies
- the significance of RDM for the practices and processes of scholarly knowledge production
- legal and ethical considerations of RDM and open data (e.g. copyright, access, privacy)
- norms and standards in order to insure interoperability and reusability of the data. the development of effective RDM plans for media research projects.
If you are interested to join our discussions and activities in this field please feel free to contact the SIG members:
Sarah-Mai Dang, Malte Hagener, Simon David Hirsbrunner, Dietmar Kammerer (see contact details below)