FORS-DaSCH Webinar Series: Data Management for Social Sciences and Humanities

FORS-DaSCH webinar series:
Data Management for the Social Sciences and Humanities

FORS and the Swiss National Data and Service Center for the Humanities (DaSCH) are happy to announce the launch of a new series of online data management webinars. The webinars are free of charge and are specifically designed for researchers in the humanities and social sciences who collect and/or process research data in the Swiss context.

The next online webinar of the FORS-DaSCH series about Data Management for the Social Sciences and Humanities will take place on December 11, 2025 (2:00-3:30PM).

It is devoted to the topic of Informed consent and its implications for data sharing, anonymisation, and ethical research practices in the social sciences and humanities.

To the registration

Previous workshop

The fourth online webinar took place on September 25, 2025. This session was devoted to how to effectively document research data in the Social Sciences and Humanities fields.

Auriane Marmier (FORS) explored the different levels of documentation, i.e. project, file, and data level, through concrete examples and discussed how each serves specific purposes and audiences. She highlighted the importance of good documentation practices to ensure data usability, reproducibility, and long-term preservation. She also introduced practical tools and strategies, such as naming conventions, codebooks, and README files, with insights drawn from real-life social sciences projects.

Watch the video:https://rec.unil.ch/videos/documentation_research_data/

Noemi Villars (DaSCH) presented examples, how project data should be presented and documented on a platform so that the public could understand rapidly what data are archived and for what purposes. She addressed the necessity of documenting a data model and a database in general, and explain why explaining how to search the data matters.

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The third webinar of the FORS-DaSCH series was on Authority data, standards and metadata and took place online on May 28, 2025, and was hosted by Rita Gautschy (DaSCH) and Auriane Marmier (FORS).

Rita Gautschy introduced the use of authority data and standards in the humanities, explaining how they ensure consistency, interoperability, and discoverability across datasets. By assigning unique and standardized identifiers to entities such as persons, places, and works, authority data facilitates metadata linking and prevents ambiguities. Standards such as the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) support structured representation, annotation, and integration of digital materials, thereby enhancing long-term data sustainability and scholarly collaboration.

Auriane Marmier focused on metadata in the social sciences, presenting widely used standards such as the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI). She highlighted the advantages of using DDI for documenting social science data, including products like the DDI Codebook and DDI Lifecycle. The presentation also introduced controlled vocabularies and thesauri (e.g., ISCO, ISCED, ELSST) and explained their role in achieving semantic clarity and interoperability.

The webinar concluded with a brief comparison of metadata practices in the humanities and social sciences, identifying shared challenges and complementary approaches.

The video of the presentation can be viewed here: https://rec.unil.ch/videos/authority-data-standards-and-metadata/

The slides are accessible here: https://forscenter.ch/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/forsdasch_webinar_metadata.pdf

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The second workshop FAIR and CARE Principles took place on February 5, 2025 and was hosted by Noemi Villars-Amberg (DaSCH) and Meret Hildebrandt (FORS). It will cover the theory behind the FAIR and CARE principles, followed by practical applications illustrated through two case studies. The webinar concluded with a 30-minute discussion.

The video of the presentation can be viewed here: https://rec.unil.ch/videos/planning-data-management-fair-care-principles/

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The first workshop on Planning Data Management took place on November 6, 2024 and was led by Rita Gautschy (DaSCH) and Auriane Marmier (FORS).

After a brief introduction to Open Science, the origins of the DMP, and the various requirements from funder and legal perspectives, the webinar presented two case studies of particular interest to the humanities and social sciences. These followed the SNSF template and focused on projects that collected different types of data, often raising challenges for researchers, namely images and interview data. The webinar then concluded with a 30-minute discussion on DMPs. By the end, participants were expected to better understand the SNSF requirements for data management planning and the subtleties of handling images and/or interview data.

This was an introductory-level Zoom meeting intended for social science and humanities researchers, as well as anyone interested in data management and data sharing. No prior experience or knowledge was required to participate.