For Attribution Developing Data Attribution and Citation Practices and Standards: Summary of an International Workshop (2012) / Chapter Skim
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9- Data Citation in the Humanities: What's the Problem?
9- Data Citation in the Humanities: What's the Problem?
Pages 59-70
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From page 59... ...
Data in the digital humanities Humanities scholars started using machine-readable data in 1948, when Father Roberto Busa began work on the Index Thomisticus. This index was a full-text concordance of every word of every work published by St.
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From page 60... ...
Human culture did not end when humans built computers, however, so digital artifacts and born-digital objects are also objects of study for humanities disciplines. Scholars are studying digital art forms, hypertexts, interactive games, databases, and digital records of any kind.
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From page 61... ...
The closest thing found in the sample to this ideal practice were papers which mention published resources, which are explicitly described, sometimes with a URL pointing to the item, but with no reference to the resource in the references. Sometimes, the references include instead a reference to a related paper, which may indicate both a desire to cite the work and a discomfort with citing resources which do not take traditional scholarly forms, or perhaps uncertainty about how to cite data resources directly.
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From page 62... ...
If, on the contrary, that familiar division of labor reflects only a way of organizing the management of paper and other physical objects, then the digital world may well converge on a different and incommensurable set of roles. In many ways, the challenge of locating reliable metadata among them, digital objects seem to be in an incunabular phase; like the earliest printed books, digital objects lack established conventions for identifying the object or those responsible for it.
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From page 63... ...
As a senior figure in the field wrote to me: I think you will still find plenty of people saying "we ran a stylometric analysis on a corpus which has these properties, but we cannot let you see the actual corpus because we did not obtain the copyright." Anti-scientism: Citing data resources may seem foreign to the culture of humanistic scholarship, an eruption into the humanities of natural-scientific practices and perhaps a symptom of science envy, to be discouraged as naïve and unhelpful. Citation chains: Print has (reasonably)
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From page 64... ...
It is not unreasonable for scholars to be skeptical of the use of URLs to cite data of any long-term significance, even if they are interested in citing the data resources they use.
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From page 65... ...
At ICPSR, we do not assess data quality ourselves; it is the community that will determine whether the sample is adequate and scientifically sound. It is important, therefore, to have that descriptive information about how the survey was conducted.
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From page 66... ...
In the United States, we now have the National Science Foundation asking researchers applying for grants to provide data management plans, and metadata are a big component of those plans. We are hoping that this will be a positive influence on what eventually gets deposited into the data centers.
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From page 67... ...
If a paper is published and others decide to make judgments about its merits and publish something themselves about the quality of the data or its content, they can do that. As a data center, ICPSR does write what we consider to be comprehensive metadata references, and we track publications based on our data.
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