RDMF VI ‘ Meeting Funder Imperatives ’

1. RDMF VI ‘Meeting Funder Imperatives’ Winning the grant and delivering the plan:a researcher’s view of data management plansas enablers or barriers.David Beavan

2. Outline • Projects at the University of Glasgow • Barriers and enablers • Project planning • Active phase • Post funded phase • Conclusion

3. Projects at the University of Glasgow • Digital Humanities in the School of Critical Studies • English Language, English Literature, Scottish Literature, Theology and Religious Studies • Major funder is the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Also ESRC, Leverhulme, Mellon, JISC etc. • Experience in developing projects • From data management plan assistance and advice • Playing an active role in the management of the project • Contributing my skills and knowledge directly to the project

4. Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech (SCOTS) • EPSRC and AHRC funded • Five year project, completed in 2007, but still active • Four million word resource of Scots/English texts and speech from 1945 to present • Research areas • Scope the current use of Scots in various genres • Grammatical differences of Scots vs. Standard Scottish English • Variant spelling rules and automatic detection/normalisation • www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk

6. Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (CMSW) • AHRC funded • Three year project, currently in final phase • Four million word resource of Scots/English writing from 1700 to 1945 • Research areas • Investigate orthographic and phonologic changes over time • Development of Literary Scots and its ideological implications • Variant spelling rules and automatic detection/normalisation • www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/cmsw/

8. Project planning – barriers • Seen as an unwelcome distraction from the articulation of the main research goals • Unfriendly and foreign terminology is off putting • Difficult to consult with individuals, guidelines or standards • Tempted to hand over to a specialist at the last minute or worse… • Written in haste with no appreciation of what is required

9. Project planning – enablers • Data created by the project is valued and respected • Life beyond project anticipated • Confidence that the research is achievable • Data management plan coherent with the overall project plan, even if it is called an ‘appendix’ • Support professionals engaged at an early stage to assist in the writing of data management plans • Research goals shaped and enhanced by technology

10. Active phase - barriers • Time sunk into fleshing out and establishing • Standards, guidelines, protocols, workflows, monitoring etc. • If data has high entropy (less structured, many special cases) standardised workflows are restrictive • Too many constraints stifle creativity, researchers feel like a slave to the machine • Slow to react to changes or new circumstances • Much effort has been sunk into processes, reluctant to change

11. Active phase - enablers • Progress monitoring and projections easily produced • Data exchange is efficient and effective • Data is documented and well understood and expressed • Additional analysis methods etc. can be easily adopted • Further exploitation of resource and or data • Access to communities and advice groups who share approaches, technologies and practises • Resource savings by establishing common platforms

12. Post funded phase - barriers • Last minute push to finish project can lead to severe departures from the data management plan • Resources must be spent to take stock, organise and archive the data and supporting documentation • Temptation to allow resource to continue as is, despite future plans

13. Post funded phase - enablers • Preservation and Sustainability • Deposit into institutional/content specific repositories • Mitigate against technological obsolescence through wise format choices and documentation • Multi-faceted re-use • Resource can later be enhanced horizontally and vertically • Data combined with other sources or absorbed into third-party resources • Learning from successes and mistakes

14. Conclusion • Starting to plan early pays off, often stimulates and informs other research facets • Support is often available, but not always well advertised • Working with supporting professionals works when viewed as sharing responsibilities and playing to strengths, not an admission of defeat • Remain flexible, plans do change • Ensure procedures do actually help reach research goals