Huvila et al. – Understanding Masking in Scholarly Data Publishing and Reuse – DS² 2021
Channel: CEFISES at UCLouvain
Date: 2021-03-16

The talk “Understanding masking in scholarly data publishing and reuse: An exploratory study of practices relating to obscurities in archaeological data” by Isto Huvila, Lisa Börjesson, Olle Sköld, and Zanna Friberg, recorded at the DS² 2021 online conference, March 15, 2021.


Research-data publishing is an aspect of the digitization of science and its products that is ubiquitous, immensely impactful on the processes and potential of academic research, and yet under-studied. Many modes of collaborative research across the STEM and SSH fields and the themes and ways of inquiry present therein involve to some extent the publishing of data either in internal and project-specific services or in open research-data repositories. The present-day weight of research-data publishing as a scholarly ideal and practice is demonstrated by the volume of ongoing work on the topic and an intensifying research attention. Increasing political and policy-making investments promote research data sharing in international academia (see e.g., European Commission's Open Research Data Pilot and ADRIANE). There are also economic and scholarly factors that drive the development towards more widespread open research-data publishing. The arguments pertaining to the latter category are manifold and powerful:research data publishing and subsequent reuse can increase the efficiency of the research process, help to verify research results, facilitate knowledge exchanges, and generate new findings via the application of other theoretical frameworks or methods of analysis or integration of new data. Large-scale research data publishing holds a tremendous promise as a means to increase scholarly innovation, efficiency, and openness, but there are obstacles that hinder such infrastructures from adding value to SSH and STEM research in accordance with their full potential. While there is broad research-based insight into scholarly data practices, such an obstacle that remains is the lack of knowledge on how researchers think and act when dealing with obscurities in the data they are publishing in digital repositories. This is a key consideration; no dataset is without some degree of epistemological uncertainty, and if the offerings of research-data publishing is to be realized a fuller range of the intellectual contexts and processes that inform pre-publication curatorial actions and deliberations must be explored and better understood.


The purpose of this paper​ is to delve into the practices of scholarly data publishing and thereby contribute to creating actionable insights that can be used to inform better and more cognizant ways of publishing and reusing research-data, repository design,and research-data policy-making. The particular facet of scholarly data-publishing practices that the paper turns towards is ​masking​. Masking of data can be done in many ways, for many reasons, with a varying degree of deliberateness, but signifies at its core a curatorial action that hides or obscures or does not approximate the complexity of the published data (Turkle, 2007). Masking can refer to such things as lessening the degreeof messiness, uncertainty, and guesswork in the data, to decreasing the granularity ofdetail in the data (Ullah, 2015), and to black-boxing descriptions of methods and use ofmethods (Donnelly, 2016).


This study approaches masking in data publishing by investigating how dataset authors navigate data-related uncertainties and obscurities that arise in the processes of publishing and curating to-be-published scholarly datasets. The study is based on 17semi-structured interviews with researchers in the field of archaeology. An analysis of the collected interview data is used to develop a typology of masking activities and degrees of masking activities, ranging from vagueness of expression to purposeful exclusion of information in dataset authorship.


The paper closes out by launching a series of discussions to operationalize and contextualize its findings. It discusses the epistemological challenges implicit in the occurrence of masking and deliberates on the extent of responsibility that dataset authors and data re-users carry for investigating the possibility of, and engaging with suspected or confirmed masking. Further, the paper connects to matters of repository design and authority by reflecting on to what extent repositories promote perfect appearance of research data over complimentary information about uncertainties and other occurrences that might be interpreted as shortcomings that limit the usefulness and trustworthiness of the dataset and the repository. While masking activities come with risks to exclude pivotal information about data, the paper is concluded by discussing if masking can also be viewed as a conscious and productive method to move forward in the research scenarios where they occur (cf. the notion of saturation in ethnographic research).