‘Data! Data! Data!’ he cried impatiently. ‘I can't make bricks without clay.‘ (Sherlock Holmes)
Most scientific research involves handling and managing data and working directly with raw data is one of the rewarding parts of scientific research. Research data management (RDM) deals with the best practices from data acquisition and data wrangling to data publishing and archiving.
In this exercise course, we will take a practical approach to RDM and work with a large existing dataset and prepare it for archiving and publication. We will explore the dataset together and acquaint ourselves with the technical and organizational side of the data. In the next step, we will clean, sort, organize, and document the dataset and its structure. Then we will prepare the dataset for archiving and publication and will touch topics such as metadata, legal considerations, data packaging formats and archiving workflows.