Exploring Research Data Management in the Visual Arts

This workshop will enable participants to actively explore the nature of research data in the visual arts and the essential elements of its appropriate management. 
 
For researchers, the effective management of research data helps validate and contextualise the outputs of artistic research, while at the same time supports the research method by enabling researchers to work more effectively and to mitigate against the risk of data lost. In addition, many funders in the UK now require data management plans to be submitted as part of the funding process. 
 
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and led by the Centre for Digital Scholarship, a research centre of the University for the Creative Arts, and working in partnership with Falmouth University and the Glasgow School of Art, the VADS4R project is currently developing a series of tailored skills development workshops and materials on research data management in the visual arts. These are focused on the needs of early careers researchers and postgraduate students in the visual arts and will be piloted over the course of the current academic year. Through utilising this emerging knowledge and practice, participants will be given an opportunity to: 
 
> examine the nature of research data in the visual arts and why is it important and to whom; 
> learn about the key requirements of good research data management and what to consider when when planning your own approach; 
> explore the vital elements of the data management planning to help support your funding proposals. 
 
The workshop will consist of a mixture of presentations and participant led activities. It will be an abridged version of the full program currently being piloted but it will offer an introduction to this vast and complex area, and participants will be able to access to the online toolkits for independent review following the session.

created.The physical nature of research in the arts presents researchers and curators with significant problems with security and preservation issues while also greatly increasing the risk of data loss and deterioration.Issues arise, for example, in the field of architecture.When data is locked up in the physical building that has been created as the output, how can this information be preserved and managed?Therefore, appropriate curation and management of research data in the visual arts is essential to • satisfy funding requirements and demands for open access; • limit the issue that production of data can be extremely time-consuming and therefore costly; • reduce its lack of discoverability or loss; • enable other researchers to test the reliability and validity of the data and the research method; • enable greater impact of research and make tracking more accurate; and • extend collaborative opportunities between researchers and teams working on similar and related data sets to create new research opportunities.

INTRODUCING THE KAPTUR PROJECT
Led by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), a Research Centre of the University for the Creative Arts (UCA), in collaboration with the Glasgow School of Art; Goldsmiths, University of London; and University of the Arts London, and supported by JISC, the KAPTUR project (2011-2013) sought to address these problems.Each partner institute had been engaged in projects together such as KULTUR and shared a common need for managing research data in the arts and therefore joined forces for the KAPTUR project.A steering group was set up to help manage the continuation of the project, and each institute provided a project officer to carry out the required work for the project.Regular meetings were held between the partners, alternating between locations-Glasgow and London.A project website was set up to help capture the work that was being undertaken and to share this with the wider community.
Visual arts research data is a valuable resource and, with appropriate curation and management, it has much to offer in learning, teaching, research, knowledge transfer, and consultancy in the visual arts.From the outset in 2011, the KAP-TUR project team noted that very little was known about the curation and management of this data: none of the specialist arts institutions (e.g., the partners involved in the project, like Glasgow School of Art, and other arts-based institutes) had research data management policies or infrastructure in place, and evidence suggested that curation practice was ad hoc and left to individual researchers with little support or guidance.In addition, the curation and management of such diverse and complex digital and physical resources presented unique challenges.These challenges were associated both with the curation (management, handling, storing the data) and the preservation of the data for reuse-such as collecting numerical data and algorithms that constitute the modeling of the human body as demonstrated by the work done by the Digital Design Studio at The Glasgow School of Art, or capturing the processes and ephemeral thoughts created during a dance performance.
The objectives of the KAPTUR project were two-fold: first, to investigate the role of research data in the visual arts; and second, to consider the application of technology to support collection, discovery, use and reuse, and preservation of research data in the arts.To support this, a number of policies, procedures, and systems were reviewed and case studies were developed to assess and understand existing tools, knowledge, and practices regarding research data management more generally.
The project began with an environmental assessment that considered issues of terminology, the role of the visual arts researcher (within the institute and externally), and how visual arts research data is created, used, and preserved (the researchers role in this process).Next, a technical review considered two questions: first, what did researchers need to support effective research data management in the visual arts? and second, what was the most appropriate technology solution to facilitate the appropriate management of research data in the visual arts?Regarding the first question, each KAPTUR partner considered the types of data that it collects and manages, disk space requirements, where the data was stored (such as shared drives and remote servers), operating environments, the cloud (whether this would be a reliable option for storage and access to data, and its sustainability as a resource), authentication methods, tracking of research data (in relation to its production and ultimate use within the research project workflows), backup procedures, and required support for the technical aspects of data management.Once the requirements were identified, a variety of potential technical solutions were identified for piloting and review.These solutions presented themselves via the repository platforms that were available to the project partners, such as ePrints and DSpace, but also alternative data management tools, including figShare and CKAN, that the team had researched.
The technical report highlighting findings and methodology for this process can be accessed here: http://www.vads.ac.uk/kaptur/outputs/Kaptur_technical_ analysis.pdf.
Finally the team developed two training sessions (which were part of the original project scope, to help disseminate findings), each one hour in duration.The first looked at the basic principles of research data management in the visual arts, and the second focused on the creation of a research data management plan.These were further developed by each partner into a pilot course using appropriate content and resources from their respective institutions with reference to their particular organizational practices, processes, and disciplinary areas.Each partner worked with different stakeholders (to help develop the training, but also to take part in it).Participants included early-career researchers, research students, established researchers, and professional support staff from a range of departmental perspectives (administrators, IT, library, etc.).Feedback from attendees was favorable, and evaluation results indicated that participants' understanding of research data management had improved or improved considerably.The criteria for assessing this were solely reliant on the perception of those attending the training and how they felt the sessions went and what they had learned.These training materials were then published freely to the higher education community.ment.However, the development of policies, procedures, systems, and training can provide an innovative and flexible approach for this data, which is iterative and open to interpretation.These approaches support appropriate curation and management of data to alleviate the issues surrounding funder requirements, elements of time and discoverability, and at the same time improve the impact of research and create new collaborative opportunities for the institutes.

Summary of Step 7.0: Preservation of Data for the Long Term
7.1 Plan for Long-Term Reuse: The delivery and use of the data will rely on longterm preservation planning that anticipates format obsolescence and storage failures.7.2 Monitor Preservation Needs and Take Action: Actively monitor the integrity and reusability of the data files using appropriate software, and apply digital preservation strategies.