##Grey data: can it be liberated?
Goals for this lesson
- Discuss grey data- identify sources
- Develop a realistic plan for getting users to contribute to a grey data archive
Once, when discussing my plans for the future, a senior scientist asked me "But Christie, what happens when the data runs out?" I was, admittedly, kind of shocked by the question. Data is all around us, and we, as humans, are generating it constantly as we go about our daily business. Sometimes you need to think about it a little harder before you realize it's actually data- for example, there's a lot of information being produced simply by people uploading photos to the internet. However, there's also a lot of classic research data that never sees the light of day- the producers of the data, for whatever reason, have not published on it.
One of the goals of this course is, in addition to teaching all the students the skills they need to make their own work reproducible, is to provide a mechanism for liberating grey data. Today, we're going to talk about how to do this, thinking about how to meet the needs of data producers and data consumers alike.
- What is grey data?
- Why is it desirable to see grey data published?
- What sources of grey data exist?
- Why might a data producer not publish on the data they've produced?
- What sort of questions can we ask of grey data?
- How do we convince producers of grey data to work with us?
Resources:
- Registry of Research Data Repositories from re3data.org