Data Curation – Question 2

I think that the answer is different if you look at pressures and needs separately. From my perspective in a research university, the sciences, social sciences, and humanities have similar needs, but to differing degrees. All three need to create infrastructure and standardization to make the data they are currently producing accessible in the future.

From a data curation perspective, the distinctions between the sciences, social sciences, and humanities are getting more and more blurred. Many of our projects at D2I aim to facilitate cross-disciplinarily and problem-based research. If someone is working on solving problems of food insecurity or flood management, they would benefit from using heterogeneous data gathered from satellites, sensors, interviews, surveys, and published documents. They could also benefit from a digital environment where they can combine methods, such as statistical analysis, data mining, and visualizations.

In our university community context, the colleges and departments within the sciences often have established data management practices, including utilizing national discipline-specific data repositories to manage and share data. In contrast, those working in the social sciences and humanities often have limited resources to put towards data curation needs.

In many ways the needs of and pressures on data curation are the same across the social sciences, humanities, and sciences. Moreover, since data curation, like other information sciences, is a “meta-discipline” rather than being strictly of the humanities, social sciences, or hard sciences, there are shared concepts and terminology that we can apply to the problems of data curation across disciplines.