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.

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Authority data, standards and metadata

The third online webinar of the FORS-DaSCH series about Data Management for the Social Sciences and Humanities will take place on May 28, 2025 (2:00-3:30PM).

It is devoted to authority data, standards and metadata. Rita Gautschy (DaSCH) will introduce you to the advantages of using authority data and standards in the humanities which ensure consistency, interoperability and discoverability across datasets. By providing unique and standardized identifiers for entities such as persons, places, and works, authority data facilitates metadata linking and prevents ambiguities. Standards such as the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) for images and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for the encoding of texts enhance digital scholarship by enabling structured representation, annotation, and seamless integration of images and texts. The combination of authority data and standards ensures long-term data sustainability, machine readability and enhanced scholarly collaboration across disciplines.

Auriane Marmier (FORS) will focus on metadata in the social sciences and present an overview of widely used social science metadata standards, including the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI). She will highlight the specific features of DDI that make it particularly suitable for documenting social science data and present some of the products developed by DDI, such as the DDI Codebook and the DDI Lifecycle. The presentation will then introduce controlled vocabularies and thesauri commonly used in the social sciences (e.g., ISCO for occupations, ISCED for educational levels, and ELSST for social science concepts), and explain how they contribute to semantic clarity, data harmonization, and interoperability.

The webinar will conclude with a brief comparison of metadata practices in the humanities and social sciences, highlighting both common challenges and complementary approaches.

Registration

Previous workshop

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.