Data and the Institutional Repository

After all the discussion about the definitions of common terms and the difficultly of clearly defining those terms in a way that eliminates any miscommunication about what is being discussed, I am a bit apprehensive about adding another to the list of terms waiting for a clear definition. But Dorothea Salo's attempt to clarify the term data in her blog is interesting and brings to light problems I had never considered.

Dorothea Salo wrote her blog post in response to Bryn Nelson's article "Data Sharing: Empty archives" which appeared in the special data issue of Nature.

In the article, Nelson's definition of data seems to refer to anything digital, including "dissertations, preprints, working papers, photographs, music scores", and Salo believes Nelson has confused two very different definitions of data in his article. Salo argues that data are "the stuff coming out of the research process that isn't prose aimed at a human audience." Which means dissertations, preprints, working papers, musical scores and most photographs are not data. Salo argues that most institutional repositories had't even thought about the complexities of data (by her definition) when they began.

According to Salo, institutional repositories decided to deal with their empty repositories by expanding their collection policies to include data. When they expanded in this way, institutional repositories failed to consider how poorly suited they are for data because they were designed to deal with documents.

But Salo remains optimistic that data repositories will not suffer from the same emptiness that document repositories have been suffering from. This is because there was already an accepted workflow for documents in most disciplines, one that most people do not believe needs to be repaired. Changing that workflow to include institutional repositories is an uphill battle. In contrast, data has never had an effective workflow to allow for scholarly communication. The data repositories that allowed scholarly communication would help researchers much more than document repositories can and as a result would be filed more readily.

As difficult as it is to clearly define something like data, failure to do so inhibits our ability to have an effective discussion about the field of digital curation. Whether we choose to accept Nelson's definition of data as anything digital or Salo's more exclusive definition of data changes the nature of the problems being discussed and in turn, the solutions to those problems. So what is data?