From Monday 29^th March 2018, the AHRC will be removing the requirements for Technical Plans and replacing these with a new Data Management Plan requirement. This will be mandatory for all Research Grants, Follow on Funding and Leadership Fellows proposals.

What does this mean for your proposal?

If you are currently in the process of developing a Technical Plan as part of an application you will need to submit it before the requirements change (29th March 2018). After this data all projects will require a Data Management Plan.

How to complete a Data Management Plan?

We have a guidance on our webpage on completing Data Management Plans. UCL’s Research Data Support Officers can review draft Data Management Plans emailed two weeks before submission deadlines. DMPOnline will include templates for the new plan alongside templates for the technical plan during the overlap of the two systems.

You can find further information on the changes from the Digital Curation Centre and on the AHRC website.

In 2017 we conducted a series of short interviews as part of the LEARN project. We asked several UCL researchers about data management and data sharing in their disciplines.

Dr Martin Zaltz Austwick is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (Bartlett). Martin’s research and teaching makes extensive use of a wide variety of data sources including government data, business data and textual data.

Our interview with Martin provides a clear example of how researchers are already making extensive use of open data and have a desire to share their own data with broad audiences. The interview also emphasized some of the challenges faced by researchers who want to make their data available as a services through interactive websites or APIs. A particular challenge is that whilst funders cover some of the costs associated with Research Data Management usually these don’t include funding after projects have finished to maintain ‘live’ data services. Supporting researchers in their efforts to present data in new and innovative ways is an area university support services may want to continue investigating.

Watch Martin’s 5-minute interview (opens a new window in Youtube).

In 2017 we conducted a series of short interviews as part of the LEARN project. We asked several UCL researchers about data management and data sharing in their disciplines.

Dr Jenny Bunn is a lecturer in UCL Department of Information Studies; she is the Program Director for the MA/Diplomate/Certificate in Archive and Records Management. She previously worked as an archivist at the V&A Museum, The Royal Bank of Scotland Archives, Glasgow University Archives and The National Archives before moving to teaching and research at UCL.

Alongside Jenny’s insights as a researcher, her professional experience as an archivist also informs her approach to Research Data Management (RDM). She emphasised the importance for researchers to reflect on three questions: what data could potentially be useful for other researchers; where to share this data most effectively; and whether some data should not be kept. A central message of the interview was the need for researchers not to view RDM as ‘keeping everything’ but instead as viewing RDM as a key component of research integrity.

Watch Jenny’s 7-minute interview (opens a new window in Youtube).

Research Area: Deafness Cognition and Language Research

Dr Kearsy Cormier is a Reader in Sign Language Linguistics at DCAL and affiliated with the UCL Linguistics research department. Dr Cormier is interested in the linguistic structure of sign languages, especially British Sign Language (BSL) and in visual aspects of language more generally.

About the project

 The Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL) Research Data Archive is an archive of 10 years’ worth of research data and associated metadata collected and analysed by Kearsy Cormier and around 20 other colleagues at the Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre, covering a range of projects on linguistics, psycholinguistics, neuroscience in the field of deafness and sign language studies.

Project funding

DCAL was funded as an ESRC research centre from 2006 to 2016 and this archive documents all the data collected and analysed by DCAL-funded projects during that time. The aim is to add to it as DCAL continues with core UCL funding.

Research Data

A wide range of data features in the archive including Survey, Behavioural Experiment, Naturalistic Linguistics, Data, Observation, Neuroscience Experiment, Questionnaire. Participants were deaf and hearing sign language users, adults and children. As this population is quite small, opportunity sampling was used. Adults were recruited from the DCAL Participant Database, established during the life of DCAL, which by the end of 2015 contained around 800 potential participants. Children were recruited primarily through schools.

Storage

Data from these projects were stored in a number of local storage facilities including a secure server at DCAL, Experimental Psychology facilities and at the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience.

Data sharing

The data are archived with UCL Digital Collections. As part of the process of setting up this archive a Data Archive and Management Policy was developed in consultation with many relevant units within UCL involving data protection, ethics, legal issues, research retention and so on.

Student involvement

Students have been involved in a number of projects included in the archive. The materials in the archive will also contribute to student teaching.

Challenges

The process of archiving multimedia data from projects spanning 20 years raised a number of challenges. An initial challenge was to identify and detail of the data to be included in the archive. This can be difficult for legacy data because researchers may have left the institution, data may be incomplete and in some cases lost. The other main issues related to dealing with the anonymisation of video data, copyright and legal issues, preservation, format, and processing issues as well as challenges relating to cataloguing and processing the collection.

Further information

This archive offers a valuable case study for projects wanting to provide a subject specific collection of research data which includes historical materials. You can read more about some of the challenges and issues faced by this project in a forthcoming paper (accessible from 05/07/2018).

In 2017 we conducted a series of short interviews as part of the LEARN project. We asked several UCL researchers about data management and data sharing in their disciplines.

Dr Josep Grau-Bove is a Lecturer in Science and Engineering in Arts, Heritage and Archaeology; he works at the Institute for Sustainable Heritage (Bartlett School Environment, Energy & Resources). He is the Assistant Director of one of the Institute’s Programmes for MRes students.

In our interview he reflects on the benefits of Data Management Plans for research students, the technical challenges of managing data and the importance of data sharing within his Institute. He also highlights the need to raise students’ awareness of good practices in data management.

Watch Josep’s 4-minute interview (opens a new window in Youtube).

This week is Love Data Week an international event ‘to raise awareness and build a community to engage on topics related to research data management, sharing, preservation, reuse, and library-based research data services.’As part of Love Data Week we are publishing case studies that highlight the ways in which people are working with research data across UCL. Today we are highligting case studies from the Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC).

Consumer Data Research Centre

‘The CDRC is working with consumer-related organisations to open up their data resources; to our trusted researchers. This enables them to carry out important social and economic research.’ UCL is one of the partners in the CDRC. There will be a drop-in on Wednesday 14 February which will offer an oppertunity to learn more about the CDRC’s data.

The CDRC has a number of case studies involving UCL researchers:

• Can smart meters save consumers and British Gas money and carbon by pinpointing which consumers are most likely and best placed to install insulation in their homes?
• Clustering Market Baskets with Bagging and Latent Dirichlet Allocation at Customer and Transactional Levels
• Customer pathway and in-store activity
• An Investigation into the Potential of Bluetooth Beacons to Monitor the Movement of People on Public Transport: A Preliminary Case Study of the Norwich Bus Network

Masters Research Dissertation Programme

The CDRC have just launched their Masters Programme:

‘A host of retailers, businesses and organisations have provided details of projects and are now inviting applications from potential Masters students to carry out research on a range of exciting topics.

The programme offers an excellent opportunity to work directly with an industrial partner and to link students’ research to important retail and ‘open data’ sources. The project titles are devised by retailers and are open to students from a wide range of disciplines. In previous years, we have worked with students from Geography (and GIS), Computer Science, Business Analytics, Economics and Statistics, but projects are by no means limited to these areas.

All students will be in with a chance to present their research at an academic conference (date tbc) with three projects selected to win prizes.’

You can find out more information and apply on the CDRC website.

This week is Love Data Week an international event ‘to raise awareness and build a community to engage on topics related to research data management, sharing, preservation, reuse, and library-based research data services.’ As part of Love Data Week, a number of free events are taking place across Bloomsbury. We will also be publishing short research data case studies as part of Love Data Week. These case studies cover a range of disciplines and types of data generated accross UCL.

The first case study looks at the British Sign Language (BSL) Corpus.

The British Sign Language (BSL) Corpus

Research Area: Deafness Cognition and Language Research

Dr Kearsy Cormier is a Reader in Sign Language Linguistics at DCAL and affiliated with the UCL Linguistics research department. Dr Cormier is interested in the linguistic structure of sign languages, especially British Sign Language (BSL) and in visual aspects of language more generally

About the project

The British Sign Language (BSL) Corpus is a collection of video clips showing Deaf people using BSL, together with background information about the signers and written descriptions of the signing.

Project funding

The video clips were collected as part of the original BSL Corpus Project, funded between 2008 and 2011 by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Research Data

The data are all video clips (and associated metadata) showing 249 deaf people from all over the UK using British Sign Language.

Storage

During the project the data was stored on a secure server within Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre at UCL.

Data sharing

The data are archived with UCL Digital Collections under the British Sign Language Corpus Project (CAVA Repository). There are two points of entry for working with the BSL Corpus data – one for researchers (via UCL CAVA) and the other that’s more user friendly for casual visitors (intended for the Deaf community). This approach offers an example of how data can be shared effectively for different audiences and make the research data more accessible to communities represented in the data.

 Student involvement

The data collected in the CAVA repository has been used extensively for teaching of Masters students.

Challenges

There were a number of challenges to the project. These include challenges related to data collection and the disclosure of names in the interview data by participants. As a result of some of these potential discoloures of names data had to be restricted to registered researchers who sign a user licence before accessing data.

Further information  

You can find further information about the project on the project website and an article on the project.

To celebrate the 3rd international Love Data Week, several Research Data Management teams from London universities have joined forces. More than 15 free events are taking place across Bloomsbury from Monday 12th to Friday 16th of February.

Most events are open to all UCL research staff and research students; here is an overview:

• Get Ready for GDPR: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, 1pm
• What’s my Research Data?: Monday, 2pm
• UCL Research IT & Data Management drop-in: Tuesday, 10am
• Get Your Data In Shape (Organizing and Documenting): Tuesday, 2pm
• Working With Audio Visual Data: Wednesday, 11am
• Consumer Data Research Centre drop-in: Wednesday, 11am-2pm
• Working With Personal Data: Wednesday, 2pm
• Making the Most of Your Research Data: Thursday, 11am
• UCL Introduction to Digital Scholarship and Open Research: Thursday, 1.30pm
• Data Management Planning: Thursday, 3pm
• Introduction to UK Data Service: Friday, 2-3.3opm

A full listing of events is available to share.

For any UCL-specific questions, please contact the UCL Research Data Support officers at lib-researchsupport@ucl.ac.uk.