Maciej Melon

On November 29, 2024, Maciej Melon from the QDA team and Magdalena Bielinska from the Open Science Platform operating within the Interdisciplinary Center for Mathematical and Computational Modeling at the UW conducted an online training on research data management and the use of the Social Data Repository (https://rds.icm.edu.pl/). The training was intended for employees of the University of Lodz Library and was divided into two parts: a discussion of the basics of research data management with a presentation of the repository, and instructions for depositing a sample dataset.

On November 27, during the Oral History Seminar, Ms. Monika Szewczyk, a PhD student at The Doctoral School in the Social Sciences at Jagiellonian University, presented an interview on participation in protests related to the tightening of abortion laws, conducted as part of a biographical method class taught by Prof. Grażyna Kubica.

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)”. If you would like to participate in future meetings or receive more information, please contact us: seminariumoralhistory@gmail.com.

On December 4, 2023, Maciej Melon from the Quality Data Archive team led a workshop at the University of Silesia in Katowice for people who want to become data stewards in several departments at the University. The meeting consisted of three parts – a presentation of a typical data management plan, a discussion of data steward tasks from the practical side, and a commentary on the support tools developed at the University for researchers carrying out projects where research data is managed.

The Open Science Platform invites you to online courses on research data management.

More information here.

The new academic year will see the continuation of the Oral History Seminars – workshop meetings dedicated to the analysis of oral history interviews. The first meeting will take place on 25th October from 13.30 to 17.30 in room 154 of the Staszic Palace. Subsequent meetings will take place on the fourth Wednesday of the month (except December). At the beginning of October, the organisers of the cycle – Dr. Piotr Filipkowski from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN) and Dr. Jakub Gałęziowski from the University of Warsaw – will send out materials for the first meeting and a tentative plan for the next ones. Persons who have not participated in the Seminars before and would like to receive information on it are requested to write to: seminariumoralhistory@gmail.com.

The National Science Centre is running a series of webinars on the topic of opening up research data across scientific disciplines. On 13 September this year. Maciej Melon hosted a meeting in this series on managing qualitative research data in sociological sciences. It was attended by 130 people.

Thematic scope of the training.

The Czarne publishing house has published Agata Szydłowska’s book entitled. “Encasement. On furnishing flats in the People’s Republic of Poland“. The book uses photographs from the dataset “Lifestyles in Polish Cities” – a collection containing materials from Prof. Andrzej Sicinski’s research, available at QDA.

On October 20, 2022, Maciej Melon presented the Qualitative Data Archive to the participants of the third edition of the Data Steward School, organized by Visnea company.

In the first part of the meeting, Maciej Melon presented the history of the Archive and outlined its current tasks related to the preservation of the cultural heritage of social sciences, data reinterpretation and research revisits. He also pointed to the transparency of methods and tools used by researchers, which the Archive promotes.

The second part was more of a workshop, describing the Archive’s tasks related to the day-to-day work on archiving and making research data available. There was considerable discussion on issues and concerns, such as the impact of anonymisation on the subsequent usability of data or the tension between making data open and protecting the rights of those being interviewed. There were also technical questions, related to file formats or the types of licences used in QDA.

We are grateful for the invitation and the opportunity to share our experiences!