Domain knowledge and data quality perceptions in genome curation work

Reusing qualitative video data: matching reuse goals and criteria for selection

Purpose

This research investigated the reuse of Video Records of Practice (VRPs) – i.e. a type of qualitative data documenting teaching and learning in educational settings. It studied how reusers' purposes and experience-level with VRP reuse influence the importance of various VRP selection criteria and how these differ depending on whether the main goal for reuse was research or teaching. It also examined whether two different dimensions of qualitative research – reflexivity and context – were factors in VRP reuse.

Design/methodology/approach

The study reports on surveys of reusers at four VRP repositories. Questions were based on the literature and interviews with VRP reusers. The response rate was 20.6% (180 of 872 distributed surveys). This paper focused on 126 respondents who affirmatively responded they reused VRPs from a repository.

Findings

Researchers using VRPs were primarily interested in examining a broad range of processes in education and studying/improving ways to measure differences and growth in education. Reusers with teaching goals were commonly interested in VRPs to engage learners in showing examples/exemplars of – and reflecting on – teaching and learning. These differences between research and teaching led to varied expectations about VRPs, such as the amount of content needed and necessary contextual information to support reuse.

Research limitations/implications

While repositories focus on exposing content, understanding and communicating certain qualities of that content can help reusers identify VRPs and align goals with selection decisions.

Originality/value

Although qualitative data are increasingly reused, research has rarely focused on identifying how qualitative data reusers employ selection criteria. This study focused on VRPs as one type of qualitative data and identified the attributes of VRPs that reusers perceived to be important during selection. These will help VRP repositories determine which metadata and documentation meet reusers' goals.

The influences of social value orientation and domain knowledge on crowdsourcing manuscript transcription

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore how social value orientation and domain knowledge affect cooperation levels and transcription quality in crowdsourced manuscript transcription, and contribute to the recruitment of participants in such projects in practice.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors conducted a quasi-experiment using Transcribe-Sheng, which is a well-known crowdsourced manuscript transcription project in China, to investigate the influences of social value orientation and domain knowledge. The experiment lasted one month and involved 60 participants. ANOVA was used to test the research hypotheses. Moreover, inverviews and thematic analyses were conducted to analyze the qualitative data in order to provide additional insights.

Findings

The analysis confirmed that in crowdsourced manuscript transcription, social value orientation has a significant effect on participants’ cooperation level and transcription quality; domain knowledge has a significant effect on participants’ transcription quality, but not on their cooperation level. The results also reveal the interactive effect of social value orientation and domain knowledge on cooperation levels and quality of transcription. The analysis of the qualitative data illustrated the influences of social value orientation and domain knowledge on crowdsourced manuscript transcription in detail.

Originality/value

Researchers have paid little attention to the impacts of the psychological and cognitive factors on crowdsourced manuscript transcription. This study investigated the effect of social value orientation and the combined effect of social value orientation and domain knowledge in this context. The findings shed light on crowdsourcing transcription initiatives in the cultural heritage domain and can be used to facilitate participant selection in such projects.

Context from the data reuser’s point of view

Purpose

Taking the researchers’ perspective, the purpose of this paper is to examine the types of context information needed to preserve data’s meaning in ways that support data reuse.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper is based on a qualitative study of 105 researchers from three disciplinary communities: quantitative social science, archaeology and zoology. The study focused on researchers’ most recent data reuse experience, particularly what they needed when deciding whether to reuse data.

Findings

Findings show that researchers mentioned 12 types of context information across three broad categories: data production information (data collection, specimen and artifact, data producer, data analysis, missing data, and research objectives); repository information (provenance, reputation and history, curation and digitization); and data reuse information (prior reuse, advice on reuse and terms of use).

Originality/value

This paper extends digital curation conversations to include the preservation of context as well as content to facilitate data reuse. When compared to prior research, findings show that there is some generalizability with respect to the types of context needed across different disciplines and data sharing and reuse environments. It also introduces several new context types. Relying on the perspective of researchers offers a more nuanced view that shows the importance of the different context types for each discipline and the ways disciplinary members thought about them. Both data producers and curators can benefit from knowing what to capture and manage during data collection and deposit into a repository.