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Data Diversity Podcast #5 – Abdulwahab Alshallal

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Welcome back to another edition of the Data Diversity Podcast, the Research Data podcast from the University of Cambridge Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC). If this is your first time here, in this podcast, I speak to Cambridge Data Champions about their journeys in acquiring and working with data in their research, with the hope to highlight interesting facets of data work, but also academic research in general. In this episode, I spoke to Cambridge PhD student Abdulwahab Alshallal, from the MRC Epidemiology Unit, and who is part of the Physical Activity Epidemiology research group.  

Currently for his PhD, he is exploring associations of physical activity, behaviour and fitness with cardio metabolic risk in different global populations. Abdulwahab recently presented at a Data Champion Forum, where he talked about working with datasets from international sources, specifically from non-Western nations, and discussed the barriers to collaboration and differences in the flexibility of institutions regarding data access and sharing. In this episode, we discussed those matters and also went into his aspirations for public health policy making and how his data driven mindset applies to this endeavour. 

I am of the mind that your social and physical environments are a big determinant of your physical activity and your general lifestyle behaviours. For example, it is unfair to to compare the UK and India because it is much easier to cycle in streets and walk around in the UK than it is in India, or Mexico or even Kuwait, and the barriers can be different. It could be pedestrian access, it could be heat, in my case it would be humidity. All of these factors matter, and we need to get data to represent those populations and use that data in such studies. – Abdulwahab Alshallal

The overrepresentation of data from Western studies in global understandings of fitness 

LO: Is it true to say that most of the data that is available now is all based on Western data sources and is it problematic then to use that to represent a global understanding of fitness?

AA: I would rephrase that. It is not that the data does not exist, rather, it is that its representation in the literature is absent. The data exists but when it comes to the data making into the literature and influencing policy guidelines, this is not yet prevalent. Take for example physical activity guidelines: every few years, data from a lot of the literature of what is published is gathered and used to make new recommendations for physical activity. It is through these guidelines that it was recommended that people exercise, for example, 30 to 60 minutes of physical activity per day. Now, the guidelines say that it is 150 minutes of physical activity per week, no matter which day you do it. But the data that influences these policies are mostly data from North America, Europe, Australia (because these are the data used in the literature cited for the creation of these guidelines). This implies that we do not think that it matters much to look at data from other places, because humans are humans. But I am of the mind that your social and physical environments are a big determinant of your physical activity and your general lifestyle behaviours. For example, it is unfair to to compare the UK and India because it is much easier to cycle in streets and walk around in the UK than it is in India, or Mexico or even Kuwait and the barriers can be different. It could be pedestrian access, it could be heat, in my case, it would be humidity. All of these factors matter, and we need to get data to represent those populations and use that data in such studies. 

The data does exist and thankfully I have made an effort to do include it in my research. One of the places where you can acquire this data is from the World Health Organisation (WHO). That is the most wide-ranging data source, and then the few others that I’m using are from the South Asia Biobank, which covers four countries in South Asia: India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Another source is the biobank from the UAE Healthy Future Study which would cover the Gulf populations, and the Qatar biobank.  

Data in his research 

LO: what are the research questions that you’re asking and what and and how is data used, or what data is needed to answer those questions? 

AA: I am interested in physical activity and asking are the associations of physical activity in the different ethnic populations different or the same? Does it matter where you live in the world? And we have made progress in this discovery. You would be the first to hear this actually but we have finished up our analysis for my first paper, and this is using the WHO data. We are close to submitting the manuscript. This is a bit of a segue but it is worth mentioning because it highlights one of the problems of the literature, but this paper touches on one of the controversies in my field. What the paper addresses is that all physical activity is good for you. For some context: there has been a recent phenomenon that we found in the current literature that uses mostly European data, that views occupational and non-occupational physical activity separately. They show that non-occupational physical activity is good for you, but occupational physical activity either has no effect or is actually bad for you in terms of mortality outcomes. What is alarming for us to instigate is to frame a paper that states that in low- and low-income countries outside of Europe, there is very little concept of non-occupational leisure time physical activity. Most of your activity is going to be in travel behavior or activity during your occupation, for example if you are doing heavy manual labor like construction and farming. So, we had to investigate that and I’m glad to report that, at least in terms of our findings, we found that occupational physical activity is not bad for you. Non-occupational physical activity is also good for you and it doesn’t matter what type of activity you do. We also were able to control the proportion accumulated in either occupational and non-occupational physical activity and based on what we found, any physical activity wherever you do it is good for you. 

We need to understand the physical activity in different parts of the world. The types of activity you’re going in one part of the world is going to be different to other parts of the world so one guideline is not going to be appropriate. We currently have one guideline from The WHO for the whole world which has 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity as the goal. Does that seem appropriate for the whole world? It might not be in terms of different countries or even different population subgroups such as young versus old or men versus women, or different occupations or different activity levels, and what really is the barrier between light, physical activity and moderate activity? It is going to be relative and likely complex. This is a shift of mindset that hopefully I will be able to contribute through my research. 

The experience of acquiring data for his research from global data banks

LO: What has your experience of acquiring data from different sources been? From what I understand, there are different barriers in place to getting the data. 

AA: Just to put it out there, I think it’s completely understandable that these barriers are in place. The data that these organisations produce is particularly high-quality, high-resolution data. Besides the WHO data, the studies from the biobank’s that I have mentioned plan on collecting data every few years from the same participants so the data really tells you about the health of the population because these cohorts are meant to be representative of the population. To put this data in the hands of researchers that you do not properly vet can be quite a risk, even if it means using anonymised data, so I completely understand the barriers. 

In terms of the the difficulty in which to get that data, it has been different. In regard to WHO data – and this is not my experience, but an experience of a researcher before me, a post doc that that worked on the same data set before me – a few years back she had to go all the way to Geneva and to perform the data analysis there because they did not have an online infrastructure in order to allow researchers from abroad to use the data. That has since changed and the way that I was able to request it is through the WHO microdata Repository.  

For the South Asia Biobank, after going through the data request, researchers are given a link to the data. The data request process itself is very comprehensive and can cause delays. It takes a lot of time, and there is a lot of emphasis on the protocol. They want to make sure that you have a proper protocol to say what you’re authorized to do. If you want to make small changes, even small changes, you have to rectify them before submitting the proposal and that can cause delays. In my case it took around six months and we just received the data, so we have not had a chance to use it. 

For the UAE healthy future study, it is actually a bit more secure than that. You do go through that process of the back and forth of going through the protocol. In terms of getting the data, from what I understand, you are using it locally. I know this from a researcher that I spoke to who works between Cambridge and the UAE. To work with the UAE healthy future study data, she’s given a laptop by the University (NYU Abu Dhabi), and she must be connected to a VPN. While she while connected to the VPN, she’s using a secure platform called NYU-Box. I believe NYU uses this platform in all of its institutions; Shanghai, Abu Dhabi. I have been told that it is very secure and you can use it offline as well.  

Regarding the Qatar Biobank, I don’t know much about the data security measures of Qatar Biobank. Through my experiences, I only know about trying to get that data. They are willing to work with foreign institutions, which is good, but the main PI of the project must be based in Qatar and the analysis must be conducted in Qatar. However, I think going through that effort and that process is very much worth it because it has one of the most comprehensive data sources in all of the Middle East that is available in recent times. It was established around 2014 and they have now up to 47,000 participants and counting. 30,000 of them are Qatar nationals and around 17,000 are foreign nationals who are long term residents. You have people from various populations which includes participants who are Indian, Egyptian, Lebanese. So, you can get to look at migrant workers, you get to look at other Arabs that are living in a specific environment, meaning that you can parse genetics out of social and physical environments. There is so much you can do and in addition to that, what makes it special, for my PhD at least, is that they have treadmill data. This is where they put people through a treadmill around treadmill test and they look at their heart rate response to exercise instead of just going through self-reported physical activity or through wearables. The Qatar biobank is the only study in that region that actually uses heart rate data so we can definitely estimate fitness in that population. For this reason, it is very much worth the effort of trying to push for it.

One thing I am grappling with at the moment is policy development, which is a bit of a departure from data. On one end, I’m gathering the evidence in order to understand the different populations of the world through physical activity to look at the different trends in fitness. Then, once we have the physical activity data, how do we know which resources to allocate to? Who should we target so fitness can tell us that in terms of policy? Who needs it the most might not necessarily be in the volume of activity. – Abdulwahab Alshallal

On the difference between self-reported fitness data and objective data

LO: Are self-reported fitness data less valuable than objective data obtained from wearables? 

AA: It is important to understand that for a long time, it was difficult to get objective data. If you spoke to a researcher from 30 or 40 years ago telling them about a cohort study that would be using wearables, they would not believe you and they wouldn’t think it would be scalable and they think it would be too expensive, and so self-reported data was the only resource that we had. Also, there are downsides to data from wearables. For example, there is going to be noise and glitches with data obtained from accelerometry. So, I wouldn’t say that self-reported data is useless.

I am a big critic of self-reported data and the dependence of the literature on self-reported data and my supervisor has made mellow about it by reminding me that it gives you context. One of the things that we haven’t been able to overcome with accelerometry is knowing what is actually happening. We can tell that they are being active, but what are they doing? When are they doing it? For example, in the questionnaires (that are used to generate self-reported data), we don’t ask people when they leave work or when they start work or commuting, we ask them to estimate their physical strain while doing those things in those specific contexts. This removes from the researcher the burden of trying to estimate what activity is happening. 

In terms of accuracy of the numbers and their influence on policy? That is a good question, and I think accelerometry would answer those questions. Using wearables and attaining objective data, in terms of specific numbers, is much more valuable. But policies in the past are not necessarily based on numbers, and self-reports have benefited us and there is still continued benefit. It is about data points which have a degree of relativity. There are people who are going to misreport because they don’t remember accurately how much activity they were doing, or they might be lying because they feel self-conscious or they want people to think that they are more active, or there might be a recall bias or a social desirability bias which could all lead to misclassifications. We asked for moderate and vigorous activity, but what is moderate to me and light to you? It’s different and relative. While there are accuracy problems in self-reported data, for the most part it tells us something that is relative to people. Take for example someone who reports 30 minutes of activity throughout the whole week versus someone who is reporting 200 or 300 minutes of physical activity per week. We could tell that the person who was reporting the more minutes of activity is more likely to be someone who’s more physically active. It’s going to be aligned more with a better blood profile than the person reporting less activity and so in terms of a relative sense, it is helpful. But having the resources that we have now and the ability to use wearable data, we should be making a transition towards that, but self-reported data still has value. I think they can compliment each other and provide context for the type of activity that you’re doing. 

On data and policy making

AA: One thing I am grappling with at the moment is policy development, which is a bit of a departure from data. On one end, I’m gathering the evidence in order to understand the different populations of the world through physical activity to look at the different trends in fitness. Then, once we have the physical activity data, how do we know which resources to allocate to? Who should we target so fitness can tell us that in terms of policy? Who needs it the most might not necessarily be in the volume of activity. For example, we may have some barriers to fitness such as environmental factors like heat and humidity, also infrastructure factors such as pedestrian access, green spaces, and how these are different in different parts of the world. But how can we use these data to influence policy development? This is something I’m starting to understand and trying to get a grip on. Soon, I will begin a policy internship so I will hopefully learn more about that. I’ve had some conversations with people in physical activity policy, and I’ve learned that in terms of what would actually influence policy, I should be looking for a shared problem and the shared solution. Take for example, cycling lanes. Say you want to create more cycling lanes, but then the government says they don’t have enough money for cycling lanes so they decide against it. But then, you also have a congestion problem and you want to achieve net zero, and you also have an obesity problem. You know what can fix that? Cycling lanes. More cycling lanes means more people are going to be actively commuting and less cars on the road, so there will be less carbon. Then, they will be interested to get on board. So it’s about framing it and that’s what I’ve realized, because framing it in terms of health is not going to take you very far. But in terms of money, or the overall goal, matching them up is going to be helpful. And it’s quite a departure from the way that I’ve been doing things which is being driven by data and what is good for health.

We thank Abdulwahab for speaking with us. We are certainly excited to see how he gets on with policy making. It would be comforting to know that there is a data driven thinker in the world of policy making, especially one that is aware of, and takes into consideration, the contextual, environmental and behavioural differences of people in different communities and parts of the world when integrating data into public health policy decisions

Data Diversity Podcast (#4) – Dr Stefania Merlo (2/2)

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We return with another post featuring our Data Diversity conversation with University of Cambridge Data Champion, archaeologist Dr Stefania Merlo from the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research, the Remote Sensing Digital Data Coordinator and project manager of the Mapping Africa’s Endangered Archaeological Sites and Monuments (MAEASaM) project and coordinator of the Metsemegologolo project. This post is short in word count but not in importance, as it touches on two reflections on the challenges of data management as a researcher who works in a global context, two aspects of present-day academia that may be relevant to many readers. This edition follows on from the previous post where Stefania talks about the challenges of extending UK-based Open Data policies to non-UK communities that may not share the same enthusiasm for making their cultural heritage artefacts available Open Access.  

In this post, Stefania reflects on how she conducts herself as a European researcher working in the African continent where her intention may sometimes be misaligned with the local data co-creators. Stefania also shares the challenge of academic mobility, where migrating from one academic institution to another results in data that is left behind, provoking an uncomfortable thought: what would happen to your data when you are suddenly rendered uncontactable? 

One would like to think that this is a rare situation, but I suspect that the situation where somebody passes away unexpectedly or even not, or somebody retires and has not made a plan for what happens to an entire careers’ data set happens more often than we know. I think it is an individual’s responsibility to make plans, but I think support should be given by the institutions and people should be accompanied through this path. – Dr Stefania Merlo

Working in the African continent and being honest about the objectives of research 

Working in Africa and in African countries, gives somebody coming from a European background, and an Italian background like me, a particular set of challenges and opportunities, because you encounter a different set up with everything – with life, and with research. Living and working in this context in various African countries, allows a researcher coming from a different background to question and challenge themselves on how they do their work. Many things that are taken for granted in other settings cannot be taken for granted in that setting. In particular that relationship with the land, with nature, and with the past. Any archaeologist that works in this setting would tell you that there are certain things that you just know from very early on that you should do. For example, although we’re dealing with the past of archaeological landscapes, you don’t just go and do your work there without acknowledging that these landscapes come in spaces and areas occupied by people today, and that those people are the custodians of the land and of the archaeology today. So there needs to be a deep engagement with communities and with people even before you put your spade in the ground. And it takes time to build relationships of trust, and relationships that then allow you to do work on your own or together, depending on what the aim of your research is.

When I do work that fulfills certain academic goals that may not be of interest to the communities that I work with, I think it is better to be honest and tell them that I’m doing this piece of work because there is an archaeological question that probably only archaeologists are interested in, and this is the part of work that I’m doing. At the same time, I think it is also important then to acknowledge that you work in a setting that includes other people, and start thinking about what work you can do with the people that are custodians of or inhabit a particular part of the world. Then you start thinking, OK, there’s a different set of activities that I can do with people that people want to do with me and let’s do that. I think that it is important to have this honesty of saying that particular things are of interest to me and to my academic community that I would like to do, and then we can negotiate together. You have to engage with the community, and I think we should be a bit more honest and a bit more specific about what the expectations from both parties are, and from the setting, we’re coming and the setting we’re going to. 

There are certain academic activities that I’m expected to do that are of no interest whatsoever for the communities that I’m working with, such as the academic publications on which my career rests. Then, there are other things that the communities are interested in that will give me no weight whatsoever in my academic career but contribute to building a relationship with the local community. These give me so much fulfillment because I realise that I am doing research work that is useful not only for my academic community, but for other people, be it students, colleagues elsewhere in the world, or the building of policies around archaeological heritage. 

Global researcher, global data 

LO: As someone who has engaged in research all over the globe, how do you deal with data that is in various places around the world? 

SM: How do I deal with my data? – poorly. I may be a digital data champion, but it has been a difficult road, and it is still a difficult road, that of even managing and curating my own data. Just to give you an example, a lot of the data I’ve collected for the past 20 years is both in analog and digital format for the same project. I have some data with me here (in Cambridge) and I still have data backed up in hard drives that I haven’t opened in a long time. The majority of my analogue data sets, maps, drawings, diaries, I have left behind in South Africa when I moved here, and I haven’t been able to bring them with me. Some of my materials are in Italy with my family. Some of my diaries I had left back in Cambridge when I left to go to Botswana in 2006 and somehow got lost. So, it has been messy and I’m not proud of it. But I’m saying it because it is a problem with a lot of researchers that have become highly mobile and have migrated from one place to another, in some cases without sufficient funding to bring all of the paperwork with them. I have been a messy data collector, since my undergraduate and PhD days, and I’ve been trying to train myself to be better, I’m still not there yet, and in part it’s just me. But I think it has also to do with this very high mobility and having to change institutions in my career so many times. And what changed is not only the location, but the requirement of what you do with data where you put it, how you avail it to yourself and to others.

And so yes, I’m not very good at it but I’m trying very hard to find a way of now putting everything together because I do feel the responsibility that comes with collecting data in different countries. Some of it is actually information that was given to me from community members or friends, or colleagues that I work with and it’s with me. 
It’s their work, it’s with me and if anything ever happens to me – if I were to change institutions, or if anything were to happen to me, including losing my memory – let me put it like that – what’s going to happen? I’ve never really thought of what would happen if I were to move or to shift? I left my previous institution quite abruptly and during COVID, and I was able to take some materials out, but some other materials I didn’t get access to and they are still all over the place.  

And then I started thinking: I have never made a plan for this kind of situation to happen. So what am I going to do now in order to make sure that these data are usable and useful for me, but perhaps also to others when I’m not present as the curator that will be able to tell you what each data asset is. I’m not even talking about the creation of metadata. Most of my photographs, digital photographs, for example, have got metadata that have been ordered. But archaeological datasets are complex, fragmented and can be dispersed so the main challenge is how would you connect the photographs with the drawings within my diary? Of course, there are dates, but it’s going take so much time for somebody else to put all of it together, especially because half of it is in digital format and half of this is in analog format. That is going be a nightmare and may not even be doable. And so, I’ve become acutely aware of the fact that we never think of this situation. We rarely think about handing over data to others in a particular form that will allow others accessibility and ability to still reuse this complex interrelated data if they were to do so. 

Worst case (data) scenario

I have another example. One of my collaborators and mentors in South Africa passed away quite suddenly a couple of years ago. They had never made a plan for what would happen to their materials. They published prolifically, so we know a lot of the research that was done over 50 years, but I am aware that they had so much more material, both physical material and files in computers. Their physical collection was transferred from their house to the University by another colleague but, to the best of my knowledge, to date, no one has been able to get access to the digital data, stored in a password protected computer. One would like to think that this is a rare situation, but I suspect that the situation where somebody passes away unexpectedly or even not, or somebody retires and has not made a plan for what happens to an entire career’s data set happens more often than we know. I think it is an individual’s responsibility to make plans, but I think support should be given by the institutions and people should be accompanied through this path. In particular, perhaps academics from other generations that may not be so knowledgeable about how to deal with data management. In particular of digital data, but also of analog data. 

Once upon a time, archaeologists used to just put everything into a library or an archive so at least we have the analog records. But again, putting them together and having them make sense is extremely difficult if we don’t think of a framework for doing so. Another issue that I’ve mentioned before is mobility. You know, how do we assist researchers that have got high mobility to deal with this every time they move? I don’t have an exact formula, but when I changed institutions before, both the institution that I was leaving and the ones that were accepting me, I was never asked ‘do you need any financial or other kind of help to transfer your data?’ I was asked to fill in forms for transferring my goods, I was given money for my visa, but nobody ever asked about my academic research and the related data. 

We once again thank Stefania for taking the time to speak to us and giving us food for thought. Stefania raises, we believe, a very important question – are we taking for granted that we will always be at hand to ensure that the data that we produce will be understood? Researchers tend to wait until a project is completed before supplying their data with the information needed to make them understood and reusable. If there’s one thing that Stefania brings to mind, is that data FAIR-ness needs to be implemented from the onset of a project and then at every juncture of the project’s lifecycle, as the research unfolds. That way, the research data will be reusable in a self-contained manner. 

Data Diversity Podcast (#4) – Dr Stefania Merlo (1/2) 

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Welcome back to the fourth instalment of Data Diversity, the podcast where we speak to Cambridge University Data Champions about their relationship with research data and highlight their unique data experiences and idiosyncrasies in their journeys as a researcher. In this edition, we speak to Data Champion Dr Stefania Merlo from the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research, the Remote Sensing Digital Data Coordinator and project manager of the Mapping Africa’s Endangered Archaeological Sites and Monuments (MAEASaM) project and coordinator of the Metsemegologolo project. This is the first of a two-part series and in this first post, Stefania shares with us her experiences of working with research data and outputs that are part of heritage collections, and how her thoughts about research data and the role of the academic researcher have changed throughout her projects. She also shares her thoughts about what funders can do to ensure that research participants, and the data that they provide to researchers, can speak for themselves.   

This is the first of a two-part series and in this first post, Stefania shares with us her experiences of working with research data and outputs that are part of heritage collections, and how her thoughts about research data and the role of the academic researcher have changed throughout her projects. She also shares her thoughts about what funders can do to ensure that research participants, and the data that they provide to researchers, can speak for themselves.   

I’ve been thinking for a while about the etymology of the word data. Datum in Latin means ‘given’. Whereas when we are collecting data, we always say we’re “taking measurements”. Upon reflection, it has made me come to a realisation that we should approach data more as something that is given to us and we hold responsibility for, and something that is not ours, both in terms of ownership, but also because data can speak for itself and tell a story without our intervention – Dr Stefania Merlo

Data stories (whose story is it, anyway?) 

LO: How do you use data to tell the story that you want to tell? To put it another way, as an archaeologist, what is the story you want to tell and how do you use data to tell that story?

SM: I am currently working on two quite different projects. One is Mapping Africa’s Endangered Archaeological Sites and Monuments (funded by Arcadia) which is funded to create an Open Access database of information on endangered archaeological sites and monuments in Africa. In the project, we define “endangered” very broadly because ultimately, all sites are endangered. We’re doing this with a number of collaborators and the objective is to create a database that is mainly going to be used by national authorities for heritage management. There’s a little bit less storytelling there, but it has more to do with intellectual property: who are the custodians of the sites and the custodians of the data? A lot of questions are asked about Open Access, which is something that the funders of the projects have requested, but something that our stakeholders have got a lot of issues with. The issues surround where the digital data will be stored because currently, it is stored in Cambridge temporarily. Ideally all our stakeholders would like to see it stored in a server in the African continent at the least, if not actually in their own country. There are a lot of questions around this. 

The other project stems out of the work I’ve been doing in Southern Africa for almost the past 20 years, and is about asking how do you articulate knowledge of the African past that is not represented in history textbooks? This is a history that is rarely taught at university and is rarely discussed. How do you avail knowledge to publics that are not academic publics? That’s where the idea of creating a multimedia archive and a platform where digital representations of archaeological, archival, historical, and ethnographic data could be used to put together stories that are not the mainstream stories. It is a work in progress. The datasets that we deal with are very diverse because it is required to tell a history in a place and in periods for which we don’t have written sources.  

It’s so mesmerizing and so different from what we do in contexts where history is written. It gives us the opportunity to put together so many diverse types of sources. From oral histories to missionary accounts with all the issues around colonial reports and representations of others as they were perceived at the time, putting together information on the past environment combining archaeological data. We have a collective of colleagues that work in universities and museums. Each performs different bits and pieces of research, and we are trying to see how we would put together these types of data sets. How much do we curate them to avail them to other audiences? We’ve used the concept of data curation very heavily, and we use it purposefully because there is an impression of the objectivity of data, and we know, especially as social scientists, that this just doesn’t exist. 

I’ve been thinking for a while about the etymology of the word data. Datum in Latin means ‘given’. Whereas when we are collecting data, we always say we’re taking measurements. Upon reflection, it has made me come to a realisation that we should approach data more as something that is given to us and we hold responsibility for, and something that is not ours, both in terms of ownership, but also because data can speak for itself and tell a story without our intervention. That’s the kind of thinking surrounding data that we’ve been going through with the project. If data are given, our work is an act of restitution, and we should also acknowledge that we are curating it. We are picking and choosing what we’re putting together and in which format and framework. We are intervening a lot in the way these different records are represented so that they can be used by others to tell stories that are perhaps of more relevance to us. 

So there’s a lot of work in this project that we’re doing about representation. We are explaining – not justifying but explaining – the choices that we have made in putting together information that we think could be useful to re-create histories and tell stories. The project will benefit us because we are telling our own stories using digital storytelling, and in particular story mapping, but it could become useful for others as resources that can be used to tell their own stories. It’s still a work in progress because we also work in low resourced environments. The way in which people can access digital repositories and then use online resources is very different in Botswana and in South Africa, which are the two countries where I mainly work with in this project. We also dedicate time into thinking how useful the digital platform will be for the audiences that we would like to get an engagement from. 

The intended output is an archive that can be used in a digital storytelling platform. We have tried to narrow down our target audience to secondary school and early university students of history (and archaeology). We hope that the platform will eventually be used more widely, but we realised that we had to identify an audience to be able to prepare the materials. We have also realised that we need to give guidance on how to use such a platform so in the past year, we have worked with museums and learnt from museum education departments about using the museum as a space for teaching and learning, where some of these materials could become useful. Teachers and museum practitioners don’t have a lot of time to create their own teaching and learning materials, so we’re trying to create a way of engaging with practitioners and teachers in a way that doesn’t overburden them. For these reasons, there is more intervention that needs to come from our side into pre-packaging some of these curations, but we’re trying to do it in collaboration with them so that it’s not something that is solely produced by us academics. We want this to be something that is negotiated. As archaeologists and historians, we have an expertise on a particular part of African history that the communities that live in that space may not know about and cannot know because they were never told. They may have learned about the history of these spaces from their families and their communities, but they have learned only certain parts of the history of that land, whereas we can go much deeper into the past. So, the question becomes, how do you fill the gaps of knowledge, without imposing your own worldview? It needs to be negotiated but it’s a very difficult process to establish. There is a lot of trial and error, and we still don’t have an answer. 

Negotiating communities and funders 

LO: Have you ever had to navigate funders’ policies and stakeholder demands?  

SM: These kinds of projects need to be long and they need continuous funding, but they have outputs that are not always necessarily valued by funding bodies. This brings to the fore what funding bodies are interested in – is it solely data production, as it is called, and then the writing up of certain academic content? Or can we start to acknowledge that there are other ways of creating and sharing knowledge? As we know, there has been a drive, especially with UK funding bodies, to acknowledge that there are different ways in which information and knowledge is produced and shared. There are alternative ways of knowledge production from artistic ones to creative ones and everything in between, but it’s still so difficult to account for the types of knowledge production that these projects may have. When I’m reporting on projects, I still find it cumbersome and difficult to represent these types of knowledge production. There’s so much more that you need to do to justify the output of alternative knowledge compared to traditional outputs. I think there needs to be change to make it easier for researchers that produce alternative forms of knowledge to justify it rather than more difficult than the mainstream. 

One thing I would say is there’s a lot that we’ve learned with the (Mapping Africa’s Endangered Archaeological Sites and Monuments) project because there we engage directly with the custodians of the site and of the analog data. When they realise that the funders of the project expect to have this data openly accessible, then the questions come and the pushback comes, and it’s a pushback on a variety of different levels. The consequence is that basically we still haven’t been able to finalise our agreements with the custodians of the data. They trust us, so they have informed us that in the interim we can have the data as a project, but we haven’t been able to come to an agreement on what is going to happen to the data at the end of the project. In fact, the agreement at the moment is the data are not going to be going on a completely Open Access sphere. The negotiation now is about what they would be willing to make public, and what advantages they would have as a custodian of the data to make part, or all, of these data public.

This has created a disjuncture between what the funders thought they were doing. I’m sure they thought they were doing good by mandating that the data needs to be Open Access, but perhaps they didn’t consider that in other parts of the world, Open Access may not be desirable, or wanted, or acceptable, for a variety of very valid reasons. It’s a node that we still haven’t resolved and it makes me wonder: when funders are asking for Open Access, have they really thought about work outside of UK contexts with communities outside of the UK context? Have they considered these communities’ rights to data and their right to say, “we don’t want our data to be shared”? There’s a lot of work that has happened in North America in particular, because indigenous communities are the ones that put forward the concept of C.A.R.E., but in UK we are still very much discussing F.A.I.R. and not C.A.R.E.. I think the funders may have started thinking about it, but we’re not quite there. There is still this impression that Open Data and Open Access is a universal good without having considered that this may not be the case. It puts researchers that don’t work in UK or the Global North in an awkward position. This is definitely something that we are still grappling with very heavily. My hope is that this work is going to help highlight that when it comes to Open Access, there are no universals. We should revisit these policies in light of the fact that we are interacting with communities globally, not only those in some countries of the world. Who is Open Access for? Who does it benefit? Who wants it and who doesn’t want it, and for what reasons? These are questions that we need to keep asking ourselves. 

LO: Have you been in a position where you had to push back on funders or Open Access requirements before? 

Not necessarily a pushback, but our funders have funded a number of similar projects in South Asia, in Mongolia, in Nepal and the MENA region and we have come together as a collective to discuss issues around the ethics and the sustainability of the projects. We have engaged with representatives of our funders trying to explain that what they wanted initially, which is full Open Access, may not be practicable. In fact, there has already been a change in the terminology that is used by the funders. From Open Access, they changed the concept to Public Access, and they have come back to us to say that they can change their contractual terms to be more nuanced and acknowledge the fact that we are in negotiation with national stakeholders and other stakeholders about what should happen to the data. Some of this has been articulated in various meetings, but some of it was trial and error on our side. In other words, with our new proposal for renewal of funding, which was approved, we just included these nuances in the proposal and in our commitment and they were accepted. So in the course of the past four years, through lobbying of the funded projects, we have been able to bring nuance to the way in which the funders themselves think about Open Access. 

Stay tuned for part two of this conversation where Stefania will share some of the challenges of managing research data that are located in different countries!