Dataverse: an open source solution for data sharing | Savage Minds

"When you think of scholarship you might think first of publications, articles and books, but that is just the final product. Yes it is polished through countless hours of research, writing, and responding to reviewers, however all that work is built on an even more time consuming foundation of collecting raw materials. In cultural anthropology this includes field notes, journals, marked up literature, audio recordings, transcripts, and maybe photographs and video. I think I even have a few 3-D objects squirreled away in banker’s boxes. Although we seldom refer to it as such all of this is 'data,' it is information awaiting interpretation. We take great pride in our finished products. Peer reviewed publications are still the coin of the realm. Our attitudes towards data in cultural anthropology are less clear. Are our data worth saving? What have you done with your data? How would you feel about sharing your data with others? ... In cultural anthropology, a discipline where so much of the self is invested and sacrificed in the work of collecting data I intuit that many of my colleagues would be very reluctant to share their raw materials. They are private for many reasons. Perhaps we see them as full of mistakes and prejudices. Perhaps they include confidential information. Perhaps they are embarrassing as that unfinished novel in your top desk drawer. We don’t write fieldnotes for an audience! ... Dataverse is an open source, online repository for data. It’s free to use and very user friendly, signing up is about as complicated as Gmail. Dataverse is for creators. It allows authors to control which data audiences are allowed to view, it preserves data files into the future, and generates citations for datasets. Dataverse is for readers too. It documents changes in data over time, allows audiences to check to see the data behind the claims, and allows an author to publicly distribute data without readers having to check for permission. Plus there’s a nice GUI to simplify interaction with the digital archive. EXAMPLE 1: Using Dataverse at the end of a study ... EXAMPLE 2: Using Dataverse from the beginning of a study ..."