As part of Making Futures, the team has also been working on a related venture with the Australian Data Archive (ADA), and SCIP (Social & Cultural Informatics Platform) at the University of Melbourne. Studies of Childhood, Education and Youth (SOCEY) is aimed at fostering a research community and website that will discuss and showcase research, link to individual project websites, and provide a portal to an archival repository for sociology of youth and education projects.
On 9 August 2018 we hosted a workshop on Open Access, Data Sharing and Archiving of Qualitative Research that explored the processes, exemplars and practices for digital archiving of qualitative projects and began to form the community that would support SOCEY.
Hosted by the Social Transformations and Education Research Hub at Melbourne Graduate School of Education (MGSE), in conjunction with the ADA and SCIP, the workshop brought together almost sixty researchers from around Australia to discuss ideas, interests and dilemmas regarding qualitative research sharing and archiving in the humanities and social sciences, particularly in interdisciplinary studies of childhood, youth and education.
The program featured a wide variety of research projects on these themes – spanning policy, research and cultural sectors – that form part of the changing context in which we conduct and communicate our research. These papers provoked animated discussion surrounding the creative, ethical, practical, methodological and regulatory dimensions of the archiving, re-use and sharing of qualitative research data in the humanities field.
The ADA, along with MGSE and SCIP, has been developing a prototype of the website and repository, and demonstrated these for attendants on the day to garner feedback. The discussions provided an excellent basis for developing this further. Over the coming months, work will continue on the site and a core working group, drawn from researchers Australia-wide, to assist in its development.
The workshop was supported by AARE Sociology of Education SIG, the ARC, Australian Data Archive, SCIP, and MGSE. The full program and abstracts can be downloaded here.
An earlier version of this post was published on the HASSCloud/HASSDevl blog on 21 August 2018.