
Transcript 5
Data management is as important as any other part really. It’s difficult to may be get people excited about it because it’s like you’re filing, it’s... you know, you don’t... you’re not... it’s kind of common-sense but actually it’s worth articulating because I think people always feel, well, you could catch up with it later if you don’t do it quite right at the time but actually, with experience, you know that you just make enormous problems for yourself if you don’t document stuff properly at the time and, really, the usability of it can be quite profoundly undermined if you can’t find it or if you don’t know quite exactly what it was and it’s all trivial things, maybe, but they can become big, important things so like if you haven’t recorded the date on which you did something and the person is speaking about ten years ago and then in a couple of years time you can’t really remember what year it was, even then the ten years ago can’t be located to a date.
Now that might not matter, depending on what you’re doing, but it might actually be very, very important because, you know, it might matter whether it was just a month after 9/11 or two years after and you won’t be able to tell the difference and so it depends on, you know, the whole purpose of what you’re doing, the topic and everything but actually why create problems for yourself?
And then there’s the public responsibility I think; if you’re getting public funding to collect data, you have to leave data in a way that is usable for other people unless there’s very good reasons not to do that.
And you won’t leave it in ways that are usable for other people if you haven’t had good procedures for documenting it as you’ve gathered it, so even if you’re all right, because it fits your purpose, you’re diminishing its public value and that’s not a good thing to do so it’s like, you know, as lecturers and teachers doing research, you know, you don’t want to teach people basic literacy and it’s almost kind of close to that.
It’s a task that’s not a glorious thing to teach and talk about but nevertheless it’s important, it’s very important. I mean, if you can’t write you’re not going to be able to writeup data; if you don’t have basic literacy and it’s more toward that kind of skill than, say, the craft of doing the actual analysis but it’s really pretty fundamental.