[Mike Fortun]

Meeting Title:
Empirical Humanities Metadata Session (Remote Access Instructions)
 
Collaborative session notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lvj3tKXWHcWpsQXd0-Xy0l8NBt8Cwk9SfLndJLvuwbc/edit
 
Meeting Location: Commonwealth A1
 
Short introduction describing the scope of the group and if any previous activities
The Empirical Humanities Metadata WG (EHM) is conducting research and developing an adoptable and adaptable protocol for designing metadata management plans (MDMPs) in empirical humanities projects. A metadata management plan (MDMP), as a subcomponent of an overall data management plan (DMP), is a formal document that outlines how metadata elements will be selected, structured, implemented, and managed within a project, and how social conventions will be developed to ensure discoverability and citability of data. The protocol will include a set of questions to ask while generating or evaluating MDMPs, and a collection of resources and guidelines for answering those questions in different ways depending on the needs of specific projects. This question and answer workflow, developed with input from an advisory board, will guide researchers through decisions about standards, policies, and cultural expectations to make ethnographic and historical data archivable, discoverable, and shareable. 
 
Additional links to informative material related to the group
Read about the WG Empirical Humanities Metadata at https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/empirical-humanities-metadata-working…
Read the case statement at: https://rd-alliance.org/group/empirical-humanities-metadata-working-grou…
 
Meeting objectives
The aim of the Working Group for Metadata for the Empirical Humanities is to develop, test and recommend a process through which researchers in the empirical humanities can build robust metadata schemes and workflows for particular projects and programs. A draft of the recommended process will be available in advance of the session. During the session, we will briefly outline the recommended process then present three distinctive use cases: 1) The Asthma Files, a project on-going for over ten years that includes numerous sub-projects, all involving intensive collaboration and data sharing among internationally distributed ethnographic researchers affiliated with an evolving, loosely governed research group. 2) STS Infrastructures, a virtual archive and research environment that supports an interdisciplinary, international scholarly field and its Society (Society for Social Studies of Science) 3) Disaster-STS Network, a virtual archive and research environment supporting a diverse array of researchers with different (often unrelated) projects, many of which include important historical documentation and/or material with high public relevance. These projects involve different data types and types of interaction among researchers and with the public, providing good cases for evaluating the Working Group’s metadata recommendations.
 
Meeting agenda

 Group introductions (10 minutes)
Update on the Empirical Humanities Metadata WG and report back on WG call-ins (20 minutes)
Presentations describing how the protocol has been implemented in three empirical humanities projects (20 minutes)
Discussion and feedback on the preliminary protocol (20 minutes)
Planning the next set of call-ins and discussion of next steps (10 minutes)

 
Target audience
All are welcome, but the session will be especially relevant for researchers, librarians, and other practitioners working in areas of qualitative data sharing and interpretive analysis or technologists standardizing metadata practices.
 
Group chair serving as contact person:
Lindsay Poirier
 
Type of meeting:
Informative meeting
 
Remote Access Instructions:
coming soon
 
 

Discussion