Edwardians Online | Digital Resources for Qualitative Data

Digital Resources for Qualitative Data

Increasing Access to Qualitative Data
New Focus on Digital Resources
Towards a Standard Framework for Archiving Digital, Qualitative Resources
Edwardians Online: Phase I
Edwardians Online: Phase II

Increasing Access to Qualitative Data

Qualidata provides a national service for the acquisition, dissemination and re-use of social science, qualitative research data. The problem of how to make resources accessible to users is therefore a central concern for the service, and Qualidata is continually seeking ways to improve its resources to meet users’ requirements. Results of earlier work in this area can be seen in Qualidata’s resource discovery hub, where users can search and locate accessible collections of qualitative data across the UK via the online catalogue, Qualicat. More recently, in response to user demand, emphasis has been on data development, with a view to providing users with direct access to the content of digitized collections via an online facility.

New Focus on Digital Resources

First steps in this content-oriented direction include an increased focus on depositing digital data in-house with the UKDA, and the digitization of ‘classic collections’ for research and teaching resources. ‘Edwardians Online’, based upon Paul Thompson’s collection of oral history interviews, 'Family Life and Work Experience Before 1918', comprises Qualidata's first major web-based digitization project. The aim is to produce a multi-media resource, which will integrate a wealth of existing primary and secondary materials relating to the interviews, including the original text transcripts, digital sound-bites of the original audio tapes, background material concerning the original research study, and details of publications based on secondary studies of the interview texts.

Towards a Standard Framework for Archiving Digital, Qualitative Resources

From these initial moves it became clear that there is a need for a standard framework for providing online access to archived qualitative resources. Therefore a further objective of the Edwardians project is to produce a prototype methodology, which may in future be developed into a more general application for other examples of social science datasets.

Edwardians Online: Phase I

Working with the example of the ‘Family Life and Work Experience’ dataset, research has focused on the following key areas:

methods of access and facilities for exploring qualitative data
developing a non-proprietary electronic format for preserving the content of qualitative datasets. This must support sophisticated searching and online dissemination and will also be truly portable and facilitate data-interchange. Accordingly, this work has investigated the suitability of available XML standards and technologies for encoding the content of archive resources
development of tools for facilitating the encoding of data in this format

In the Online Project pages there is a description of the encoding methodology developed in Phase I of Edwardians Online, which has seen the initial digitization of a subset of the ‘Family Life and Work Experience’ dataset in XML, and the types of access that this method supports.

Edwardians Online: Phase II

In Phase II of the project Qualidata will be focusing on the development of additional search and retrieval functionality and the encoding of additional features in the interview texts. Qualidata also aims to present a Document Type Definition (DTD) for a generalized XML application for qualitative datasets, that can be used by other data creators and data publishers to encode a broad class of qualitative data.

If you require further details of ongoing and future work please contact: Nadeem Ahmad

Introduction to the Online Project
Digital Resources for Qualitative Data
XML Application for Qualitative Data