Inclusive Data Research Skills for Arts and Humanities/What kinds of research can data-oriented arts and humanities researchers do and what are the possible challenges?

Data-oriented arts and humanities researchers can:

Digital and data skills are becoming increasingly important parts of the arts and humanities. These kinds of data that have always played an essential role in Arts and Humanities are available in digital formats. Equally, the lives of everyday people are now played out in ways that develop digital data, creating new sites and opportunities for arts and humanities research. In terms of arts and practice research, data can play a crucial role in many forms of digital art, making digital and data skills a valuable tool for creation of new art and insights.

Using digital and data skills, Arts and Humanities researchers can:

• Analyse and critique the assumptions that underlie big data-sets
• Invent new ways to visualise data
• Understand how people use social media
• Share ways of understanding data that do not come from colonial perspectives

Arts and humanities researchers can also use their knowledge of data and digital skills to question those skills using the knowledge of data as a way of pushing back against assumptions and biases of technology and technology-based research.

Digital and data skills can be tools of resistance.

Some of the challenges are:

While digital and data skills can provide many opportunities for arts and humanities researchers, there are also some challenges. Over the course of the DAReS project we have identified some of these challenges, and where possible started to look at ways of addressing some of these challenges.

While there are specific challenges, one of the difficulties can be with regard to culture and language. This is a twofold challenge; on the one hand, those from a science, technology or data background may use specific disciplinary language and have an expectation of background using computers, maths and programming. While this background isn’t needed, for example, learn to code in Python.

On the other hand, language and culture can be challenged when working with data, as most data is collected from a Western colonial perspective and may only sometimes inherently create space for alternative viewpoints. As arts and humanities researchers, we can bring our knowledge and expertise of critical perspectives to data research as a way of questioning and interrogating the data – this is done with more authority when speaking from a place of having sufficient knowledge of the skills and tools.

Other challenges can be:

• Lack of skills to manage a lot of data
• Lack of technical skills (from creating pivot tables to coding)
• Not knowing where to find data sets
• Understanding how to ask the kinds of research questions that can be answered by data and through data skills
• Multi and interdisciplinary work is inherently really difficult, right from coming up with the right question to analysing and writing up the data

Some of the core ways of overcoming these challenges include:

• Networking: being engaged in data and digital research does not mean arts and humanities researchers need to become experts in the tools themselves. However, building connections with peers with interests and knowledge in computing and informatics is a way to co-create projects
• Attending interdisciplinary conferences and workshops where there is space to tackle some of the issues you are trying to address.