Bringing qualitative data to life through online access and citation

The Digital Futures project, an 18 months project funded by the ESRC, aimed to build a new system for publishing enhanced qualitative data. In 2014, the project launched Qualibank, a user-friendly platform for: publishing, presenting and searching the content of qualitative data,and enabling citation of these data at the data level. Today this system is in use by the UK Data Service for publishing its key qualitative data collections. The Qualibank system offers a streamlined data publishing workflow for data and metadata marked up with schemas, including the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) amongst others. The paper details how these are used and implemented across different shapes of content - from interview to dairies to hand written essays, and biographical writings (from the Mass Observation Archive) to second world war reports (from The National Archives).  Part of the project included a national scoping, selecting and digitising older paper based collections, guided by archivists, scholars and teachers who aimed to work on some of the data. Some of these scholarly uses and publications that persistently cite extracts of data in the system are showcased.