Paradata Workshop

About paradata

Paradata is a relatively new term that refers to how data is collected, used, reused, adapted, and shared. Unlike metadata, which describes a resource, paradata captures user activity and therefore serves as a separate layer of information. It can be seen as an essential building block of open research practice by structuring information about the research process.

Program

Keynote lecture: Paradata: documenting and understanding practices and processes

Describing, documenting and understanding how people and machines do things is notoriously difficult. At the same time, understanding social and technical processes and practices and their outcomes, limitations, opportunities, and biases is often critical. A parallel complication, apart from capturing such process information, termed paradata, is that it tends to be highly contextual and specific to particular tasks, individuals, communities and situations. The same applies to the amount and specificity of what must be known. This presentation showcases research and findings from the ERC-funded research project CAPTURE, which has developed an in-depth understanding of how paradata is being created and used and what methods are used for identifying and capturing paradata. Challenges with paradata include how to enable and support the creation of paradata that is sufficient, relevant for its future users, and not too labour-intensive to produce and maintain. Considering the extent to which paradata is coincidental and exists because of the lack of cleaning and standardisation of information, a significant challenge is also how to make and keep it technically manageable, but at the same time rich enough for diverse user needs.

Bio

Isto Huvila is a Professor of Information Studies at the Department of ALM. His research interests include information and knowledge management, information work, knowledge organisation, documentation, and social and participatory information practices. His research contexts range from archaeology and cultural heritage, archives, libraries, and museums to health information and e-health, social media, virtual worlds, and corporate and public organisations.

Panel discussion

The panel discussion aimed to reflect on how the concept of paradata can be used in various disciplines, including musicology, psychology, and archaeology. Paradata describes information about the research process itself and can, therefore, be seen as distinct from metadata (data about data). However, how does paradata relate to regular documentation practice, and how can it be used to educate students and researchers about the need to enhance transparency and reusability of research outputs?

Panelists

• Isto Huvila: Professor of Information Studies at Uppsala University, researches information practices, documentation, and knowledge organisation across domains such as archaeology, health, and digital humanities.

  Agata Bochynska: Senior Academic Librarian at the University of Oslo Library, specialising in open research, reproducibility, and digital scholarship, with a background in psychology and linguistics

• Steinar Solheim: Associate Professor of Archaeology at the Museum of Cultural History, UiO, focuses on prehistoric demography, climate impacts, and the transition to agriculture in Southern Norway.

• Anna-Maria Christodoulou: Doctoral Research Fellow at RITMO, UiO, exploring multimodal music information retrieval and AI-assisted music analysis to enhance accessibility in music research.

• Matthew Good (moderator): Senior Academic Librarian at the University of Oslo Library, leading the Digital Scholarship Centre and working on open research, innovation, and research data management.