Case Studies for Breakout Session II

Professor Big leads the History of International Trade Research Centre, which has been established for ten years. Its staff has grown to ten people, eight of which are research assistants. Professor Big is extremely pleased: he received a grant letter yesterday from the British Academy for a new two-year project. This grant will enable Professor Big to continue to employ two of his faithful research assistants, and to appoint a new half-time technician. Beyond the scope of the project Professor Big expects to benefit from many years of significantly increased research output for his centre, based on the data collection of trade statistics created in the project. A condition of the British Academy grant is that the data collection, on completion of the project, will be offered for deposit to the History Data Service.

The creation of the collection involves the gathering, digitisation and standardisation of structured data from many different sources. His research assistants are familiar with this type of work, and in particular with the professor's own coding system for trade goods. The technical element of the project however is more important than in any previous project, due to the sheer size and complexity of the data collection. Professor Big is confident however that their previous experience with smaller and less complex data, in combination with the appointment of the technician and the purchase of a brand new UNIX running Alpha (or was it the other way around?) will smoothly deal with any imaginable technical problems...

Tive Creat was over the moon when two and a half years ago his PhD proposal was accepted by the University of Hissoft, and he received a grant from the Goodbye Trust for the History of Dentistry to work on this. Since then the moon has darkened somewhat, though.

His PhD proposal stated: 'An important aspect will be that a computerised database of most of the primary and some of the secondary materials will be created, including the textual sources and images described in section 4 of this proposal'. More than 2 years of research has resulted in an overwhelming amount of material (more than Tive Creat had anticipated) which can potentially be computerised, and indeed almost thirty percent is now included in Toolbox, which can handle both text and images. He doubts however, whether there is any chance of successfully digitising even half of the remaining data, if he wants to write up his thesis this millennium. Having said so, he hopes to get a return on his investment if more acknowledged academics would only use and cite his collection. Tive acknowledges though, that during the remainder of his PhD and the foreseeable future thereafter, he unfortunately will not be able to deal with the distribution of the data. Worse, he may not even have access to a PC to word-process his job applications...

Dr Accident is a lecturer in British modern history at the University of Coincidence. His own research area is the voting behaviour of parties and comparison of trends with Scandinavian countries in the interwar period. To analyse voting patterns he has (over a period of 12 years) created a collection of data and also used some data given by a Scandinavian colleague. A selection of this data has been used in his teaching as well. He also uses data created by one of his postgraduate students: some additional statistics in Backstat, which was very popular seven years ago. All in all Dr. Accident is very pleased with his collection of data, though to his distress he increasingly struggles to get even basic support for Backstat, Goole.spread and EQData to name some of the software packages Dr Accident has learned to love and hate over the years. The fact that the crucial scripts he himself carefully designed to combine and integrate data from the various packages, were treated with a combination of amusement and disdain by one of the computing advisers 4 years ago has not contributed to his relation with local support staff at all.

Ave Rage, despite her name, has done well on her MA exams. The last and highest hurdle for a distinction will be the dissertation, to be handed in 3 months time. The exams have fully occupied Ave, so she has to move quickly on finding some meaningful agricultural data on Avebury and surrounding area for the second half of the 19th century. Her usually helpful supervisor suggested this time: 'Try the library or somewhere else. There is plenty of stuff out there', and disappeared off to someplace warm and exotic. Ave however is more desperate for any 'cool' data, preferably reliable statistics she could copy and paste into her thesis...

Russ T. Frate is very experienced in using computers in his work as an economic historian specialising in sixteenth and seventeenth century wages and prices. For many years he has extensively used data from colleagues and his former PhD supervisor at GosGlaw University, and created a variety of useful data collections, many of which are used within departmental courses. Russ knows that using someone else's data is not always straightforward, and does not hesitate to frequently knock on colleagues' doors to ask advice when using their data. While browsing the web he recently discovered a list of descriptions of apparently relevant data available through the National Historical Sources Repository (NHSR) which he had heard of but never dealt with himself. He was slightly surprised when his request for this data could not be fully completed by phone the other day. It was explained to him that his signature on a form was needed, and the data could then be provided promptly. Russ is now waiting for the forms to arrive, and still confident to have the new data ready for analysis and comparison with his own set of statistics before term starts in two weeks time.

Liz Longaround has been teaching at the department of medieval history for fifteen years. Her well-thought out and much refined third-year course has - for the past five years - focused on land ownership in the central middle ages, and she has no plans to change this. Well, had no plans...

The department has been severely criticised in the Teaching Quality Assessment for its unimaginative (read, none) use of computers in its teaching and for not taking advantage of the thorough training students receive in the use of computers (email, the Web and word-processing) in their first three months at University. The Head of Department has therefore asked Liz Longaround to revise her course and introduce computers somewhere. He has promised that the University Teaching Advisory and Support Unit will provide lab assistance.

Liz Longaround is not very happy with this development: she had just started working on a new book hoping to get it published by the next Research Assessment Exercise. Also, she has no suitable computerised data, although after a chat with a colleague from another university she has become quite enthusiastic about the potential of creating maps to illustrate and analyse the location and size of landholdings. Having visited the Geography department she is convinced that their so-called 'polygons' are far too complicated for her simple purposes. If only there were some maps and data ready to be used....

Ms Libbie is very pleased with her appointment, now three months ago to the Library of the University of Booklands. The Library has recently published its three-year strategy emphasising the need to make local and national electronic resources more accessible. Ms Libbie is a great believer in such resources, based on her personal experience of research into child mortality rates in Burslem seven years ago during her history degree. Unfortunately, she had not had the opportunity to use any of the new and exciting electronic services since.

In her new post, Ms Libbie is in particular responsible for advising the postgraduate students of the very successful and large department of Modern History, which since two years ago has included a research centre on census data. The department currently attracts 30 Master and 10 PhD students a year, and with the new research centre this number is expected to rise. In her first three months, Ms Libbie has given personal advice to at least ten students planning their MA-thesis - and she expects the others will turn up soon since the deadline for proposals is a week from now. So far Ms Libbie has not had time to thoroughly investigate her predecessors files, but she has found a stack of leaflets 'Introduction to the University Library for postgraduate history students'. It largely relies on explaining the old card catalogue, which was digitised three years ago. Although Ms Libbie enjoys the personal contact with students - if only they would just have clear questions - she would like to restrict this to less than her 35 hours a week....

Mr Knowall of the national centre 'Past to present' received the following email yesterday:

"Dear Mr Knowall, I understand your centre sells History computer-teaching packages for Higher Education. I give a course on land ownership in the medieval period. Please send me your catalogue. Ms Longaround"

Mr Knowall explained to Ms Longaround in a lengthy telephone conversation that his centre did not have computer-based teaching materials for sale (indeed were not allowed to by their funders) but that he could advise her for free on how to use such materials if she could find them herself. Ms Longaround appeared to be very disappointed about this and Mr Knowall did do his best to provide her with advice as to who to contact. During the conversation he also discovered that she would be interested in combining maps with data but that a visit to the local Geography department had discouraged her. In the end Mr Knowall decided it would save him time to go and find some suitable materials for Ms Longaround's course himself, in particular since he recently had more queries from Medievalists so this one-time investment would pay off.

John Tendicca has now worked for three years as software support officer for the Humanities and Social Science in the Computing Services of the University of Coincidence. His original despair at the archaic software used frequently in the departments has gradually changed into reluctant acceptance, and even active interest in some of the systems and data. Yesterday, Dr Accident (who had quite a reputation with his predecessor) came into his office, obviously reluctant and sceptic about any positive response - with disks and CD-ROMs. As far as John understood, Dr Accident had just received the disks and CD-ROMs from a Scandinavian colleague. The disks appeared to hold a lot of SPSS data and set-up files. No problems so far, although proper documentation regarding the precise nature of the highly coded data seems to be lacking. However, the CD-ROMs were a novelty to the Doctors department. The disks and CD-ROMs appeared to be Johns nightmare come true; data in at least 3, possibly four different formats (2 of which John had never heard of) and apparently more than 80 (!) different batch files which manipulate the data for different purposes.

John would not be his cheerful self, if he had not laughed loudly when the Doctor explained this and almost caused a premature end to their conversation. In the end John agreed to see what he could do to merge the data in someway. Nine in the evening, working on his own system, he is completely captured by the intricacies of the scripts (smart programming, he must admit) and safe from University regulations stating support will only be provided from 9-5 for University approved software only ...yawn...