This document discusses the importance of properly documenting digital research. It provides several quotes emphasizing how documentation allows researchers to understand past work, remember decisions made, and reproduce experiments even after time has passed. The document also presents examples of well-organized folder structures and file naming conventions that help provide necessary context and information for future use of research data and results.

1. Digital Research: preserving
your research data
…yes I said data!
Dr James Baker, Curator, Digital Research
@j_w_baker
james.baker@bl.uk

2. www.bl.uk 2
Some admin…
You are free to:
– Copy, share, adapt, or re-mix
– Photograph, film, or broadcast
– Blog, live-blog, or post video of;
this presentation provided that:
– You attribute the work to its author
and respect the rights and licences
associated with its components
– You distribute the resulting work only
under the same or similar license to
this one
Text attribution Greg Wilson, Two Solitudes, SPLASH 2013 (29 October 2013)
http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/splash-2013
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-
ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
unless stated otherwise.

3. www.bl.uk 3
More than resource discovery
“The emergence of the new digital
humanities isn’t an isolated
academic phenomenon. The
institutional and disciplinary
changes are part of a larger
cultural shift, inside and
outside the academy, a rapid
cycle of emergence and
convergence in
technology and culture”
Steven E Jones, Emergence of the
Digital Humanities (2013)

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‘Literary scholars and historians have in the past been limited in their
analyses of print culture by the constraints of physical archives and human
capacity. A lone scholar cannot read, much less
make sense of, millions of newspaper pages. With
the aid of computational linguistics tools and digitized corpora, however, we
are working toward a large-scale, systemic understanding of how texts
were valued and transmitted during this period’
David A. Smith, Ryan Cordell, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, ‘Infectious
Texts: Modeling Text Reuse in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers’ (2013)
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dasmith/infect-bighum-2013.pdf

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discipline
camp and
camps sentence

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‘the fragility of evidence in the
digital era’
‘[the digital] archive is considerably more fragile than one would like’
‘The simultaneous fragility and promiscuity of digital data’
Roy Rosenzweig, Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era, The
American Historical Review 108:3 (2003), 736, 737, 739.

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Why bother?

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‘The core guiding principle is simple: Someone unfamiliar
with your project should be able to look at
your computer files and understand in detail
what you did and why […] Most commonly,
however, that “someone” is you. A few months from
now, you may not remember what you were up to when you created a
particular set of files, or you may not remember what conclusions you drew.
You will either have to then spend time reconstructing your previous
experiments or lose whatever insights you gained from those experiments.’
William Stafford Noble (2009) A Quick Guide to Organizing Computational Biology
Projects. PLoS Comput Biol 5(7): e1000424. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000424

10. www.bl.uk 10
Victory is mine: while ago I worked out some
Clever Stuff (tm) in Excel. And I MADE NOTES
ON IT. And those notes ENABLED ME TO DO
IT AGAIN.
Katie Birkwood (girlinthe). “Victory is mine: while ago I worked out some Clever Stuff
(tm) in Excel. And I MADE NOTES ON IT. And those notes ENABLED ME TO DO IT
AGAIN.” 7 October 2013, 3:46 a.m. Tweet.

11. www.bl.uk 11
Documentation
What – How – Decisions – Connections – Formats

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Structure

13. www.bl.uk 13
domain / record / reference number
http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/record/SBD0931

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root events
research
teaching
writing
rootresearch 2014-01_Journal_Articles
2014-02_Infrastructure
rootresearch2014_Journal_Articles analysis
data
notes

15. www.bl.uk 15
Notes about this folder.docx
VS
2014-01-03_writing_readme.txt
2014-01-03_Writing_readme.md

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rootresearch2014-01_Journal_Articlesdata
2014-01-31_Journal_Articles.tsv
2014-01-31_Journal_Articles_notes.txt
rootresearch2014-01_Journal_Articlesanalysis
2014-02-02_Journal_Articles_analysis.txt
2014-02-15_Journal_Articles_analysis.txt
2014-02-02_Journal_Articles_analysis_readme.txt
rootresearch2014-01_Journal_Articlesdataderived_data
2014-01-31_Journal_Articles_KW_africa.tsv
2014-01-31_Journal_Articles_KW_america.tsv
2014-02-01_Journal_Articles_KW_art.tsv
2014-02-02_Journal_Articles_KW_britain.tsv

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Thank you!
@j_w_baker
james.baker@bl.uk
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/
Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/drjwbaker/2014-0317-clrlhslides
Notes: https://gist.github.com/drjwbaker/9596448