The Metadata and Persistent Identifiers workstream has been built on work prior to the beginning of the project that highlighted the STEM focus of the discoverability and interoperability landscape.
Our approach was very much that we wanted to work to change existing open standards rather than creating new and/or proprietary ones.
At NISO Plus 2022 we proposed to prioritise ORCID, DataCite, RAiD, Crossref, CRediT, COAR and RIOXX. However when we brought together a planning team to discuss the practicalities for the metadata and PIDs workshop (including the tight timescales) we realised we couldn’t address them all. We had the initial survey results by then and it became clear that there were three priorities – DataCite, RAiD and CRediT.
As such we ran a workshop for those who had expressed an interest via the project survey and representatives from the various communities to bring these voices together.
The researcher / practitioner perspective
Project CoI Professor Helen Bailey (KCL) presented from the perspective of the researcher / practitioner. Helen trained as a contemporary dancer and has since pursued an academic career focusing on education, research and leadership in interdisciplinary performance practice and its insertion with technology. She has been at the forefront of developing interdisciplinary practice research within an e-research context.
We present a transcript of her presentation, edited for clarity.
“The…main…idea…here is…that the ecosystems built within these projects are mulitdisciplinary and interdisciplinary and that the outputs can integrate in multiple domains. That the practice in and of itself within any given project is often iterative. So I think the beauty of the portfolio model for me and probably where, you know, I’m hoping that we can think about development is that the practice itself is very rarely complete and there’s often a kind of intersection between research that then allows for further insights.
You may use a source in one form. It may then be reworked and utilized in another. I think there’s something about how we identify the relationships between different research outputs in that the journey and the development of the broader project that is very useful in terms of emergent practices. Often in these kind of interdisciplinary collaborative projects, the insight and the kind of the development happens as an emerging practice rather than one that you’re setting out at the onset and that’s, you know, I know, a real challenge in the process of discovering how do you find the thing that you don’t know that you’re looking for? I think that that often drives the kind of; that creative practice led research initiative initiatives are often that. The emergent emergent practices.
I think something about that, that iterative process and how the portfolio kind of almost sits alongside you as you’re undertaking your your research, perhaps it’s not, necessarily a retrospective activity and there’s something perhaps about the way in which you develop it, that’s helpful in terms of understanding the insights that you’ve gained. .
And then I think in terms of that idea of that we ran through of the tangible and the non-tangible research outputs in in the context of time based practice research. Well, you know that certainly those that have a performance element, often those that are live whether that’s co-located spaces or live and technologically mediated live research outputs often need to be marked by their absence. So often what we are capturing is an artefact or sort of residual translation of the practice into something else, and some of those artefacts or residual objects can often be generated by others, so they may be generated by a non-participant or a participant. I think that often you’re marking the absence of the live product or event if you like, but through the capturing of a range of kind of residual or associated artefacts.
I think that that was a helpful one for us to think about because certainly I’m going back to Adam (Vials Moore)’s point about how you get practice out of the other category is to sort of welcome and acknowledge that you’re not necessarily going to be able to capture all of it in its modality that we have to, you know, transpose it, translate it, remediate it into other forms. And it there’s a sort of acknowledgement of that, I suppose, in the use of the non-tangible category.
One of the things that’s emerged and I know certainly from engaging with the community with colleagues over a period of time is that in terms of practice, research and the AHRC, one of the key outputs is methodology. So how we know, not the subject matter, not necessarily the contents. It’s the new compositional approaches. It’s the new technical approach. It’s new insights into the generation and construction of meaning, etcetera, or indeed the collaborative relationships and interplay between those relationships as a work is generated. I think that’s something that would be valuable to the community and I know that’s a kind of challenging area in an area that we’ve begun discussion on.
So much I think of a lot of current practice is collaborative by nature and I think that recognition of the kind of challenge to the sort of traditional idea of the author and authorship as a single point is really welcome and understanding and recognizing that role of the collaborative and contribution from artists into a project changes as the project evolves and shifts.”
The Haplo (Cayuse) repository schema
This workshop was the first change that the Haplo (Cayuse) team have had to give the community an overview of the schema that underpins the repository developed in collaboration with Westminster and their specifically designed practice repository instance. One of the highlights of the Haplo schema is that its flexibility allows for the tailoring of object/output descriptions matched to the characteristics of the output whether that has some notion of permanence or is ephemeral. Another is that aliases laid on top of the underlying schema names give a more intuitive matching of functionality to interface and input without disrupting the core information model. These aliases can also then inform external linkages across schema (cf crosswalks), allowing a better and more etymological alignment across taxonomic spaces when matching ontological surfaces.
DataCite
Work had already been done over the past couple of years to review and update the metadata schema and there is a Metadata Working Group by which it is possible to contribute recommendations. Jez Cope (Data Services Lead at the British Library) and responsible for the UK DataCite Consortium kindly agreed to look at the practice research repository schema work we had done so far and how it might map to the DataCite schema. His presentation is available below. It is notable that the work on aligning Practice Research with general A&H metadata is progressing well but that there’s still room for addressing specific areas with the community.
Research Activity IDentifier (RAID)
The project team were able to use our existing connections with the RAiD team at the Australian Research Data Commons to find out whether there might be some interest in connecting up the work we are doing with RAiD – and we had a fantastic meeting to talk about the potential for connecting up these two areas. Natasha Simons, Associate Director, Data & Services at the Australian Research Data Commons kindly put together a video and this presentation for us to look at why RAiD might be relevant to practice research.
Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)
Work at the University of Westminster has highlighted the need to recognise a wider range of creators and the role of the collaborator. Some of this work is relevant to the DataCite schema however in light of NISO having ratified CRediT as a standard in February 2022, and based on discussions we had already had with colleagues at NISO to connect up our work – one of the CRediT working group (Alison McGonagle-O’Connell) kindly agreed to come along and talk about what is going on at CRediT and the opportunities for engagement.
In conclusion
The workshop highlighted the importance of ongoing work to ensure that, independent of platform, metadata standards can encapsulate information on Practice Research and exchange it. This work is at varying stages of maturity across the various schema but it is vitally important that the needs of the PR community are embedded in the design and development plans of all as the standards evolve and platforms adopt and implement them.
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