In spring 2023, NECSUS has introduced a section with data papers in which a diverse array of papers has been published since (on film festivals, on Laterna Magica shows in the Netherlands, on annotations of films about the financial crisis, on depiction of the EU in television). With this call NECSUS want to renew its interest in data paper from the community of media scholars. NECSUS are therefore calling for data papers that systematically present specific aspects of film and media studies through data sets that have been carefully selected, curated and groomed.
In the field of Digital Humanities, Digital History and Digital Methods, the publication of data papers has been established for a longer time. A number of specialized journals for data papers in the Humanities and Social Science have been established – two prominent examples are the Journal of Open Humanities Data and the Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Journal of Digital History adds data and layers of visualisations to its articles, so it combines traditional research with the idea of data papers.
What is a data paper?
A data paper is usually understood as a publication of a documented data set on a specific topic with an associated documentation. This documentation describes how, when, and why the data was collected and what the data set contains. The documentation might also contain a critical reflection on the selection of data, the questions one could raise in conjunction to the specific data set and suggestions for future research.
Besides the publication of the data itself (which, if no other option is available, can be published with a persistent identifier in the media-studies repository media/rep/), a data paper should consist of the following sections:
- Introduction (contextual information about the project and the origin of the data; an explanation of the potential of the data set)
- Methods (type of data collection, sampling methods, materials and codes used, use licenses)
- Description of the dataset (descriptors and identifiers of the data)
- Conclusion (potential for further research)
Visibility and Collaboration:
The section “Data Papers” in NECSUS contributes to the visibility of data work in our field and it allows young and upcoming scholars working with data to broaden their publication list. This section thereby honours and makes visible work that has been often below the radar and thus invisible for academic recognition (job market, prizes, promotion, tenure etc).
Moreover, data papers are often multi-authored collaborative publications. By including data papers in NECSUS, the collaborative scholarly research would also gain additional momentum, which we see as a (welcome) challenge in our fields. It would also allow staff that often gets no credit in the humanities (data and IT specialists, student assistants, early career researchers, infrastructural staff) to be credited as part of the work in a larger team.
This section, like the Audiovisual Essay section, is a “curated” section in which data is published alongside a documentation and discussion. The section is edited by Alexandra Schneider ([email protected], Mainz) and Malte Hagener ([email protected], Marburg).
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