An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Martina Karels (IASH-SSPS Fellow, 2026)
From open data to feminist archiving: reimagining data sharing for the humanities and social sciences
In this work-in-progress seminar I provide an overview of my fellowship project which challenges current frameworks of "open data". New demands for depositing and sharing data across the humanities and social sciences are largely driven by funders, by new modes of research governance, and new digital infrastructures. Openness is primarily understood as a technical problem of infrastructure, compliance, and standardisation, practices and buzzwords that risk reproducing extractive forms of knowledge governance that decontextualise qualitative materials, obscure the labour involved in preparing data for reuse, and undermine the ethical relationships that underpin much social research. I will discuss how a reconceptualision of open data through feminist and community archival theory offers possibilities of a fundamentally different understanding of data sharing: records are not neutral objects but products of situated practices of selection, description, care, and accountability. When applied to qualitative research data, this perspective reveals archiving as an active methodological process that shapes what data become, how they travel, and whose interests they serve.
Meeting ID: 384 971 962 716 1
Passcode: nV6Rg79e