March 10, 2027 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM
You arrive at work to see your project's primary investigator/research coordinator/key graduate student disappearing into a UFO's buzzing blue beam; with all their project knowledge and disconnected laptop gone forever…or at least til the aliens return them home. While an alien abduction is unlikely to strike your research team, life happens: research coordinators get hired into roles at another university, graduate students return home, PIs go on research leave or get sick unexpectedly and need to step back. Clearly writing out research processes, clear file and folder workflows, organized data storage systems, and more are excellent research practices to make sure everyone is on the same page and your research project is resilient to change. It can also help keep qualitative coding and variables or units of measurement in quantitative projects consistent across multiple researchers. Even if you're going solo as a graduate student, documenting your data and keeping a good research log will help you unpack what you did when it comes time to write up your project.
No prior knowledge is required! This session is designed for researchers who want to think through their documentation and workflows; from graduate students working alone to tenured faculty with a huge research team. Undergraduate students interested in future research might also find it interesting.
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
- Create quality file names from bad ones
- Design folder structures that make sense for their project
- Identify types of documentation and locate templates and resources to help them create their own
- Transfer knowledge of storage workflows into their own projects
Details: Any preparatory work for the session can be found on its information page. This virtual workshop will be recorded and shared on the same page, and discoverable via the Sherman Centre's Online Learning Catalogue.
Certificate Eligibility: This workshop is eligible for the Sherman Centre's certificate program. For more information, visit scds.ca/certificate-program. It is also eligible for the Canadian Certificate for Digital Humanities. To learn more, visit ccdhhn.ca or contact scds@mcmaster.ca.
