Smart qualitative data: methods and community tools for data mark-Up (SQUAD) Research Report

The ESRC Qualitative Archiving and Data Sharing Scheme (QUADS) aimed to support short-term research grants to develop new models of qualitative research archiving and data sharing which tackle in innovative ways the epistemological, ethical, methodological and practical challenges raised by the re-use and re-analysis of qualitative material. In essence the SQUAD project sought to explore methodological and technical solutions surrounding: data context; systematic data descriptive standards, and information extraction and mark-up utilising language technology. These areas provide some of the key building blocks for enabling emerging innovations in qualitative methods, including increased, yet managed, access to data, linking data sources and data mining. The work builds on ten years of work in this field by ESDS Qualidata in enabling qualitative data sharing. But progress in data re-use has been somewhat hindered by preconceptions and sometimes less than innovative approaches to qualitative research (Corti and Thompson (2004)). However, a cultural shift is happening in a new willingness to share and utilise other research sources. Fielding's (2003) scoping study examined issues for the role of qualitative data in e-social science and emphasised the need for ‘tools that allow data to be published to the Web more easily and support online interrogation of data via standard Web browsers’. However, transforming the data into an acceptable web- or grid-exposable form is not straightforward, and a significant amount of manual effort is required which is both timeconsuming and costly. This fundamental challenge was addressed by developing tools that support researchers and reduce the costs involved. Specifically, tools need to be developed for publishing marked-up enriched data and associated linked research materials (such as researcher observation or audio materials) to the web and for longer term archiving. SQUAD brought together research expertise and applications from social science research and methodology with computational linguistics as applied to qualitative data archiving and sharing. Evidence of successful bridges between these two disciplines is sparse and this project showed a practical contribution to interdisciplinary collaborative practice and innovation. In creating tools the SQUAD project wished to provide user-friendly guidance that would help speed the process of adoption (by researcher communities and learners) of some of the methodological advances proposed in relation to qualitative research archiving, data sharing and re-use.