Sarah Bratt – Dissertation Defense

Research Data Management Practices and Impacts on Long-Term Data Sustainability: An Institutional Exploration

Data sustainability is critical across many contexts, from global health crises such as COVID-19 and climate change, to deeply intimate datafied contexts like medical records and cultural heritage archives. In response, institutions increasingly introduced guidelines to manage research data, leading to emergent forms of academic labor. However, the emergent nature of this work can often render practices invisible to the very technologies, institutions, and policies aiming to support them.

This dissertation is comprised of 3 studies to make these faculty data practices explicit in research and design with the aim of advancing long-term research data sustainability. The first study surfaces institutional factors associated with data deposit. The second details a framework to explain data deposit in genomics research. The third applies the framework, comparing high- and low-institutionalization data management contexts (ICSPR and GenBank) to identify factors that promote or inhibit long-term research data sustainability.

Using mixed methods including semi-structured interviews, I show data management work is not extraneous but central to requirements assessments for process improvement and evidence-based data policy. The approach of data “articulation” challenges the long-standing paradigm which considers later stages of the data cycle as key sites for engaging the sustainability dilemma.

 

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