The aim of this glossary is to provide a list of terms relevant to Enact. It is a living document, so please email any suggestions and feedback to Enact@westminster.ac.uk
Contributor
An individual, group or organisation that contributes to the development, creation, delivery or dissemination of a research project or output. Examples include:
- Practice researchers or co-researchers;
- Artists, designers, makers or performers involved in the research;
- Research assistants and project staff;
- Community partners or participant groups;
- Curators, producers or exhibition coordinators;
- Technical specialists (e.g. sound engineers, videographers, software developers, fabricators);
- Archivists, librarians or information specialists.
Depositor
The person responsible for submitting research outputs/processes, supporting materials or metadata to the repository. This could be the researcher themselves or someone else on the project such as a research manager.
Institutional repository
A managed digital platform that stores, preserves, showcases and provides access to an institution’s research outputs and associated materials, and which integrates with open standards to allow repositories to be searchable, communicate with each other and share data as appropriate.
Metadata
Metadata are data that describe and contextualise other data or resources; that is, data about the thing (such as a book’s publisher, year of publication, etc) rather than the content of the thing (what the book is about). Common categories include administrative metadata (management, ownership, preservation and access), descriptive metadata (discovery and understanding), and structural metadata (relationships between components and organisation of complex objects).
Output
In practice research, the research output is the practice itself, whether a creative work or artefact such as a publication, exhibition, performance, composition, design, digital work or another outcome arising from research activity. An output can include a research narrative or other forms of articulation.
Participant
An individual who takes part in a research project by contributing data, experiences, perspectives, creative input or other forms of involvement. Participants are not researchers themselves, although in artistic contexts they may be contributing in specific ways to the research by being part of the performance, or part of a team creating an artefact etc. It is up to the main researcher to distinguish these different roles and contributions: Enact allows for a wide range of roles and contributions to be linked to an output.
Pathfinders
The Enact Pathfinders Programme is a key part of Enact’s co-design approach. Participants from a range of Higher Education Institutions are bringing knowledge and experience of creating, collecting and sharing practice research. This feeds into the creation and development of Enact in areas such as licensing, metadata, user interface and user experience.
Persistent Identifier (PID)
A PID is a long-lasting, unique reference used to identify a digital resource, person, organisation or other entity, and to provide a reliable way of finding or accessing it over time. A PID enables citation. Examples are a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for journal articles, datasets and reports or an ORCiD record for researchers.
Practice research (PR)
PR is a process of investigation through practice that generates new knowledge, insights or understanding and communicates these through research outputs with accompanying research narratives as appropriate. It encompasses research in which creative practice is the significant method of inquiry. Practice researchers explore and address research questions through creative practice itself. The creative work develops or discovers the most effective form for addressing the questions being investigated. Through this process, the work produces new insights and knowledge. For more, see the Practice Research Advisory Group (PRAG-UK) reports (Bulley and Şahin 2021). Practice research is also an ‘umbrella term’ inclusive of a wide range of similar terms such as practice-based, practice-led, practice-as etc (see Bulley and Şahin 2021 ch.1.1.5 for more discussion of terminologies).
Practice research data
PR data are all the things that a practice researcher feels it might be useful for other researchers to see that articulate or support the research insights and dissemination – evidence, documentation and materials generated, collected or used during practice research, including exhibitions, performances, recordings, images, notes, sketches, datasets, artefacts, participants, collaborators, process documentation and other supporting content.
Practice Research Advisory Group (PRAG)
PRAG-UK is a body established by members of the HE arts research community to increase the visibility and accessibility of UK practice research and its impact, and to make this research more searchable internationally.
PR Voices
This project, led by library and research management domain experts, working in close collaboration with academic discipline experts, reviewed existing open-source software and standards and began building the intersectional PR community. It built on Westminster’s pioneering PR repository development work and tested findings from the PRAG-UK reports. PR Voices merged with SPARKLE in 2022 to create Enact.
Research Excellence Framework (REF)
REF is the UK’s system for assessing the quality and impact of research conducted by higher education institutions, informing research funding allocation and benchmarking research excellence. REF recognises practice-based outputs.
Repository
A repository is a container for things, it can exist in the physical world – libraries, archives and museums are all repositories – as well as the digital world. A digital repository is an online service to store, describe, manage and share digital material. It can include a range of types of material from text-based documentation to audio and visual media.
Research
A process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared.
SPARKLE
The SPARKLE (Sustaining Practice Assets for Research, Knowledge, Learning and Engagement) project worked to build on the PRAG-UK reports to scope what it means to provide a heterogeneous and extensible infrastructure for practice research that befits the multi-faceted, multi-disciplinary, multi-format nature of practice research, and reducing reliance on standardised asset-types. SPARKLE merged with PR Voices in 2022 to create Enact.
Taxonomy
A taxonomy is a structured scheme of classification, such as the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT).