Epistemic data practices

This case studies report is part of a larger complementary methods study on open data. The three case studies included here illustrate specific aspects of data sharing within three fields: Soil Science, Human Genetics, and Digital Humanities. 

Project Title: Open Data, the researcher perspective 

Abstract: Studies of open data often focus on the status and potential of making data publicly available for reuse by academic actors situated outside of the local context in which they were produced or by public actors not directly associated with academic research (Borgman 2012). This formulation of open data imagines the widest practical range of potential (re)users and invokes significant effort to prepare data for use by unknown others. Often overlooked in this approach is the assessment of data practices that occur in fields with a tradition of data sharing that would not be considered ‘open data’ in the political sense. In this study, we shift the focus from concerns of public access to an account of data sharing practices associated with the process of conducting research. We adapt Leonelli’s (2013) framework for open data in the development of six epistemic dimensions associated with data sharing: (a) data situated, (b) pragmatics of sharing/reuse, (c) incentives for sharing/reuse, (d) governance/accountability, (e) commodification and (f) globalization.