Don’t try to fit the Humanities into an Open Science shaped box

Fred Breese - Research Services Co-ordinator for the Office for Open Research, University of Manchester

At the start of this academic year I was fortunate to present to a group of postgraduate researchers from the AHRC North-West Doctoral training programme, on the topic of open research. This was the first time I had spoken to a purely humanities focused audience about open research, an audience often missed by a focus on “open science”. Discussing reproducibility for example, while directly relevant to some in the room using quantitative methods, would miss the mark with many humanities researchers.

In the field of Research Data Management work has begun to begin to address this issue, with RDM professionals facing similar barriers to engaging researchers in the humanities. The language of collecting data is often foreign to researchers own conceptions of the research process. This is despite there being a wide range of materials that arguably should be considered data. A broad range of examples has been assembled by Haley Eckel from the University of St Andrews RDM team.

When it comes to research data in the humanities, what ‘counts’ as data can be confusing. Bibliographies, annotations, archival notes, primary and secondary sources, stemmas, digitised items, finding aids, text corpora, critical apparatus, thematic research collections, focus group notes, interview coding, images, critical editions: these are just a few examples of data in the humanities. [1]

This variety shows how distinct the use of data is in the humanities, much of which is already openly shared as a matter of course. The richness of this landscape shows the importance of valuing outputs beyond traditional journal (or monograph) publications, which is core to open research.
A working group on Open Research in the Arts and Humanities at The University of Cambridge has further understanding the differences in the open data landscape (and equally the open research landscape) in the arts and humanities. They write, coining the acronym CORE data.

Our data is collected rather than generated; organised and recontextualised in order to further a cultural conversation about discoveries, methods and debates; and explained as part of the analytical process. [2]

Based on this I would suggest the first challenge to face for those in the open research movement is recognising open research activity already taking place in the humanities, and its impact on research culture. It’s important to understand disciplinary differences, as with CORE data above, not trying to fit the humanities into an open science shared box. Listening to what humanities researchers want to achieve, we will be able to prioritise supporting fantastic work which is already taking place.

* It’s worth noting that the application of the concept of reproducibility in the humanities has been explored at a theoretical level [3] [4].

Over the summer, we have had the exciting task of reviewing projects submitted to both the Open Research Fellowship, and the Open Research Accelerator Fund. We received an overwhelming number of applications to both initiatives (totalling over £450,000 in funding requests). It was really great to see the variety of projects submitted, highlighting the diversity of the open research movement at the University.

You can keep up to date with both initiatives on the Office for Open Research website.

[1] https://openresearch.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/2023/04/a-quick-overview-of-data-in-the-humanities.html
[2] https://unlockingresearch-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=3148
[3] https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-018-0060-4
[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0149-x