Opening Up Academic Research Projects – it’s not just about researchers.
Given the dramatic events concerning the recent riots in England, I was interested to find news of an AHRC-funded project Around 1968: Activists, Networks and Trajectories, based at the Department of Modern History at the University of Oxford.
According to the news item on the AHRC website, the project undertook “hundreds of interviews with former activists from the 1968 revolutions which shook Europe have been analysed and put online”. Useful context, I thought, for the very different types of riots that were happening in England.
However, on arriving at the website there were a number of issues that impeded me from getting access to the interviews.
First of all, I had to prove myself as a bona fide researcher. I’m not actually a researcher, but given that I work in a university context, this was not too difficult. Nonetheless it was irritating not to get immediate access.
But once into the database, it remained tricky to use the online collections.
The primitive search interface presumed one already knew exactly what type of content was in the database. There was no context to explain the precise nature of the content, nor how to browse through it a meaningful way.
Then when one did find an actual result, one was presented with a catalogue record. The interview was itself hidden away at the very bottom of the page, with little indication of what the speaker may be discussing.
The audio files were massive, some over 100MB, which tested the normally rapid Joint Academic Network (JANET) connection when the downloading process began. And rather than the files being cut up into smaller, more digestible snippets, one had to listen to the entire recording to glean any sense of it (although transcriptions for some of the material did help).
For anybody unfamiliar but interested in the archive, this all added up to a disappointing website. The site was (and remains) a great opportunity for the research team to engage with a multitude of interested parties. But they way the content was presented restricted its usage to a very narrow set of scholars.
To an extent, this is the result of the slow moving wheels of scholarly tradition.
Academics have a long and fruitful history of undertaking oral research with individuals and communities. For much of this time, there has been no feasible way to share the data collected with parties outside interested research groups.
And most importantly, those undertaking oral history are familiar with the need for anonymising or protecting the voices of those who have ‘dedicated’ their selves and their identities to a project, particularly in contested political or social areas. In legal terms, it’s called data protection, but ‘identity protection’ seems a more apt phrase.
This tradition means that researchers have not really considered disseminating their research collections. But the changing digital environment and its potential to attract and engage audiences outside the academy put a radically different spin on this. It offers researchers an ideal channel to disseminate aspects of their research to a much wider audience; an audience, consisting of taxpayers that are funding the researchers, that is showing much greater interest in why academic projects are funded. Neglecting this audience is no longer feasible.
So we need to have a different approach to compiling and disseminating oral history. Researchers must be more proactive in explaining why oral histories should be made openly available. Often, interviewees have a fear that appearing on the Internet will make their position more vulnerable. But on a world wide web that that contains billions of billions and pieces of content, where individuals expose their identities is myriad and often self-defeating ways, one oral history is often little more than a merest drop in the ocean.
And if there really are identity protection issues which need to be adhered to make the research project work, teams need to devise strategies to disseminate their research data. For example by exposing metadata, anonymising recordings, creating summaries, or editing versions of the original interviews. Although challenges exist, it is possible to make research outputs available to other researchers and a broader public, while respecting the concerns of interviewees and safeguarding privacy.
There can be no real excuse for getting half a million pounds of government funding and then allowing the fruits of that research, of a topic with relevance to contemporary concerns, to be available only to a narrow band of scholars.
(Alastair Dunning, JISC – thanks to Simon Hodson for feedback)
Application numbers for recent call for JISC Content (06/11)
Application received for the recent call for JISC Content (06/11)
- Strand A, Digitisation for Open Educational Resources (OER): 18 applications (8-12 projects between £75,000 and £125,000 each will be funded)
- Strand B Mass Digitisation: 68 applications (7-9 projects between £150,000 and £750,000 each)
- Strand C, Clustering Digital Content: 23 applications (6-8 projects between £100,000 and £150,000 each)
Peer review meetings are taking place on 22 and 23 September. We hope to inform winners by the end of September, and make public announcement in early October. The projects will start in November
Digital content, schools, HE, employers: how easy is it to work together?
Some of the projects in the recent JISC Community Collections programme and Strand B of the eContent programme 2011 have looked at digital content as an opportunity for higher education institutions to engage more creatively and effectively with schools and employers. Interacting with digital content can provide imaginative ways of filling the gap in resources in particular subject areas and help foster collaboration and exchange between school teachers, pupils, universities staff, students, and employers.
But, in spite of the fact that many of us will follow the School>Higher education>Employment path, in more or less linear ways, how easy is it for these “sectors” to work collaboratively and ensure that students experience a smooth transition from one to the other?
OurWikiBooks, based at the University of Manchester, addressed the lack of resources and low uptake in Computer studies at A level and undergraduate level, which has serious repercussions on the job market. The project created a wiki-based resource where school teachers and students could collaborate with university students and staff in the creation and adaptation of relevant resources.
Queen Mary College, University of London, is tackling the literacy skills in STEM subjects needed by A level students through STEM WISHEES (STEM Writing in Schools, Higher Education and Employment Settings). The project is creating a web-based resource with texts from students and employers which exemplify the level of literacy skills needed within HE or in the work place.
Although not representative, some of the issues these projects have encountered are indicative of wider concerns or attitudes in the sectors under consideration.
At a more operational level, the question of timing is vital to ensure alignment of project activities to the school academic year. School teachers need a long lead time in order to plan activities within the year’s curriculum, especially if these are perceived as additional extras rather than core ones and things like school holidays, terms time, exams and planning cycles need to be taken into consideration.
Secondly, when setting out to work with schools, who is the right person to approach within a school? Headmaster? Advisors? Subject Coordinators? Teachers? Finding the right contact can be time consuming and STEM WISHEES found that despite having existing school links, it took them a number of meetings and phone calls before being able to identify the actual teachers they would be working with.
However, even once the right contact has been identified, for effective engagement to take place it is essential to get their buy-in. One needs to allow time for teachers to “get to grips” with the project, understand its purpose and above all understanding how it will benefit them, their work and their students. Project Manager Mark Van Harmelen from OurWikiBooks found that “… they [teachers] became much more engaged once we had visited their schools to speak to them face to face.”
Moving on to knowledge and skills, the interaction with digital content itself can be problematic. If digital content and the use of technology can be seen as an opportunity for more creative engagement with other sectors, at the same time it can also constitute a barrier.
Despite working with teachers and students of computer studies and the fact that many were familiar with Wikipedia, OurWikiBooks found that using a platform such as Mediawiki was still difficult for non-wiki specialists, particularly in its use of markup language. The project’s final report observes that “there is also a resource obstacle in that teachers do not have enough time to adopt novel and experimental classroom practices given the pressure on them to cover syllabus topics and ensure that their pupils do well in exams.” So the use of innovative tools and working patterns can be inhibited by the more focused requirements of school routine.
While contributing to the wiki web site, some students also inadvertently committed plagiarism and showed lack of awareness of IPR issues when it came to using other people’s content on the internet.
These issues of digital literacy and behaviour reflect wider concerns within our sector that are not solvable by any individual project, but which however constitute an extra burden on project resources. JISC, among others, is currently addressing digital literacy for both students and staff within higher and further education through its Digital Literacy programme in partnership with a variety of stakeholders within and outside the educational sector.
And finally, a question of culture: confidentiality vs openness. STEM WISHEES found that the kind of texts they would have liked to source from employers are too sensitive for employers to release openly on an educational web site (texts such as technical or research reports, minutes of meetings, agendas etc). While the ethos towards openness is fast gaining ground within the educational and public sectors, in the private sector the attitude to “open” can be undermined by more pragmatic concerns, which will, in turn, affect what is “openly” available to students and teachers.
In summary, yes, it is possible to work together but a number of issues have to be tackled:
• practicalities at operational level such as aligning the time of a project with the school year, allowing time to identify the right contacts and ensuring their buy-in into the project
• knowledge and skills: taking into account of the extra demands placed on projects focusing on digital content by issues of digital literacy
• cultural attitudes: confidentiality vs openness, reconciling the demands of the private sector with the public sector ethos, balancing aspirations with pragmatism.
Clustering and Sustaining Digital Resources: some case studies
JISC has just published the reports from its 2009-11 Content Programme in multiple formats, including ePub for eBook readers.
There were two strands to the programme, and the case studies in the report will be useful for those who wish to
a) develop digitisation strategies within their own institutions
or
b) create websites that cluster together digital content from disparate sources
Some of the examples of the projects featured in the report include
- Connected Histories, which combines search results over 11 large historical resources. (University of Sheffield)
- RunCoCo, which provided support and guidance for those undertaking crowdsourcing projects. . (University of Oxford)
- CHICC, which explored setting up a conservation and digitisation centre of expertise at the University of Manchester
- Visualising China, which draws together images and videos relating to Historic China. (University of Bristol)
Important updates for bidders to JISC eContent Capital programme
If you are planning to submit a proposal to the current JISC eContent Capital programme 06/11, please note the following guidance updates:
- Appendices: as stated in the funding call in paragraph 128, no extra appendices are allowed to be included in addition to the ones requested by the Call for proposals (FOI tick list and supporting letters).
- Funding range for Strand B projects: the funding range for projects in Strand B is between £150,000-£750,000 as stated in the Call.
The relevant slides (16 and 31) from the briefing day have been updated and are available here (see bottom of the page).
If applicants have already prepared additional appendices, they should incorporate any crucial information into the main body of the proposal and not submit any extra appendices.
Apologies if this has created any confusion.