Danuta Życzyńska-Ciołek

A dataset entitled “LEARNFORCLIMATE: Learning to Realize Multiple Forest Policy Objectives under Climate-Related Stress and Disturbance”, authored by Prof. Krzysztof Niedziałkowski (IFiS PAN), has been published in the Qualitative Data Archive. The collection contains selected data and materials from the international project of the same name, which aimed to develop mechanisms for mutual learning among actors involved in the implementation of forest policy. The Polish part of the project was funded by the National Science Centre, Poland (grant no. 2021/03/Y/HS6/00035).

On 25 February, the Oral History Seminar took place at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN). The meeting focused on literary—particularly poetic—adaptations of oral history testimonies, as well as their translation into foreign languages. The introductory talk was delivered by Justyna Czechowska, the translator of Marit Kapla’s book Osebol, a poetic record of conversations with residents of the Swedish town of the same name.

The next Oral History Seminar will be held on 27 March at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Łódź. Prof. Kaja Kaźmierska and Dr. Jarosław Pałka, authors of the book Soldiers of the Polish People’s Army: Oral Histories [Żołnierze Ludowego Wojska Polskiego. Historie mówione], will present an interview with one of their interlocutors.

The Oral History Seminars are co-organized by the Qualitative Data Archive at IFiS PAN, the Faculty of Culture and Arts at the University of Warsaw, and the Polish Oral History Association. The initiative is under the patronage of the Wrocław Yearbook of Oral History. The schedule of upcoming seminars can be found on the website of the Polish Oral History Association. For more information, please contact: seminariumoralhistory@gmail.com.

The Oral History Seminar was held on December 3, 2025, at the Depot History Centre in Wrocław. The analysis focused on two interviews conducted by Dr. Kamil Borecki (the “Remembrance and Future” Center, Wrocław) as part of research on the solidarity strike that took place in Wrocław in August 1980. The interviews served as a starting point for a discussion on interpretations of oral history.

The Oral History Seminars are co-organized by the Qualitative Data Archive at IFiS PAN, the Faculty of Culture and Arts at the University of Warsaw, and the Polish Oral History Association. The initiative is under the patronage of the “Wrocławski Rocznik Historii Mówionej” („Wrocław Yearbook of Oral History”). If you would like to participate in future meetings or receive more information, please contact us at: seminariumoralhistory@gmail.com.

A dataset titled ‘An Explanation-oriented Inquiry Dialogue Game for Expert Collaborative Recommendations’ by Qurat-ul-ain Shaheen has been published in the QDA. The dataset contains selected materials from a study aimed at evaluating the usefulness of a dialogue protocol designed to facilitate collaborative decision-making among medical experts. Participants were presented with scenarios (medical cases) based on anonymized patient data from a publicly available dataset titled ‘Thyroid Disease‘. In each scenario, participants were asked to diagnose the patients and prescribe appropriate treatment. After each session, qualitative interviews were conducted with the study participants.

The first Oral History Seminar of the 2025/2026 academic year took place on October 22, 2025, at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. The seminar focused on an interview with Ms. Róża Karwowska, recorded in Cieszyn by Dr. Jolanta Epstein (Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences) as part of the project “Czechoslovak-Polish Scholarly Entanglements in the Cold War Between High Politics and Individual Strategies”. This interview is part of a collection of biographical recordings conducted with the families of doctors and medical professionals associated with the Silesian Hospital in Cieszyn.

This year, the Oral History Seminars will take place in various cities across Poland. Scheduled dates are: December 3, 2025 (Wrocław), January 29, 2026 (Gdańsk), February 25, 2026 (Warsaw), March 27, 2026 (Łódź), April 22, 2026 (Kraków), May 27, 2026 (Warsaw), and June 17, 2026 (Lublin).

The Oral History Seminars are co-organized by the Qualitative Data Archive at IFiS PAN, the Faculty of Culture and Arts at the University of Warsaw, and the Polish Oral History Association. The initiative is under the patronage of the “Wrocławski Rocznik Historii Mówionej” („Wrocław Yearbook of Oral History”). More information can be obtained at: seminariumoralhistory@gmail.com.

The Qualitative Data Archive of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN) collects and provides access, via the Social Data Repository, to qualitative research materials originating from social research. To enable the sharing of other types of data produced or collected by IFiS PAN researchers, the Institute has created its own collection in the RepOD Open Data Repository.

On 22 October 2025, Maciej Melon, who administers the collection, participated in a meeting of representatives of institutions managing their own collections in RepOD. The aim of the meeting was to present selected collections — including the one maintained by IFiS PAN — and to discuss the principles for verifying shared datasets. Approximately 60 administrators of institutional collections took part in the event. The meeting was organized by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling at the University of Warsaw.

The IFiS PAN collection is available here: https://repod.icm.edu.pl/dataverse/ifis

Six academic institutions – the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the University of Warsaw, the Warsaw School of Economics, the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, and Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń – have joined forces to establish the Consortium for Social Data.

The initiative aims to: (1) coordinate Poland’s accession to, and participation in, the European research infrastructure CESSDA (ERIC), (2) archive and provide open access to social data, (3) maintain and ensure the long-term operation of the Social Data Repository.

The Consortium has been set up for an initial two-year term, with the possibility of extension. Its membership is open, allowing additional institutions to join in the future.

On July 16, 2025, the Minister of Science and Higher Education approved a document titled „Polityka otwartego dostępu do danych badawczych finansowanych ze środków publicznych” [‘Policy on Open Access to Research Data Funded by Public Resources’]. The development of the Policy was undertaken to comply with the provisions of the Act of August 11, 2021, on open data and the reuse of public sector information.

The policy is addressed to entities within the science and higher education sector that possess research data generated with public funding. The document is not normative in nature – it serves as a ‘roadmap’ containing information, goals, recommendations, and proposals regarding open access to research data. A follow-up document will be developed, providing a more detailed action plan that specifies how individual tasks will be implemented, including the identification of appropriate sources of funding.

A dataset titled ‘Digital Communication Content Corpus — a manually and automatically annotated corpus’, authored by Dr. Maja Sawicka from the University of Warsaw (UW), has been published in the QDA.

The Digital Communication Content Corpus was created as part of the project ‘Methods for studying digital communication and textual data’, funded under the 16th edition of the University of Warsaw’s Didactic Innovation Fund competition in the years 2020–2022. The project was carried out in collaboration between the Faculty of Sociology at UW, the Institute of Polish Language at UW, and the CLARIN-PL consortium.

The corpus includes material from public profiles on major social media platforms used by Polish internet users: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The communication recorded in the corpus concerns five topics that participants of the classes conducted within the project deemed important: methods for diagnosing misinformation and combating it (fact-checking), issues related to climate change (climate), body positivity and attitudes toward the body (body), communication by actors hostile to the EU (anti-EU), and current conspiracy theories (conspiracy_theories).

On June 4, the final Oral History Seminar of this academic year took place at IFiS PAN. The presenter was Dr. Kamil Borecki ( “Remembrance and Future” Center in Wrocław), who is conducting research on the solidarity strike in Wrocław in August 1980. He presented an interview with an employee of the Wrocław River Shipyard, who was one of the strike leaders at his workplace.

The Oral History Seminars are co-organized by the Faculty of Culture and Arts at the University of Warsaw, the Qualitative Data Archive at IFiS PAN, and the Polish Oral History Association. The initiative is under the patronage of the “Wrocławski Rocznik Historii Mówionej” („Wrocław Yearbook of Oral History”). More information can be obtained at: seminariumoralhistory@gmail.com.