What is data?
Research data are collected and used in scholarship across all academic disciplines and, while it can consist of numbers in a spreadsheet, it also takes many different formats, including videos, images, artifacts, and diaries. Whether a psychologist collecting survey data to better understand human behaviour, an artist using data to generate images and sounds, or an anthropologist using audio files to document observations about different cultures, scholarly research across all academic fields is increasingly data-driven.
Research data takes many different forms. Data may be intangible as in measured numerical values found in a spreadsheet or an object as in physical research materials such samples of rocks, plants, or insects. Here are some examples of the formats that data can take:
- Documents (text, MS Word), spreadsheets
- Lab notebooks, field notebooks, diaries
- Questionnaires, transcripts, surveys
- Codebooks
- Experimental data
- Films, audio or video tapes/files
- Photographs, image files
- Sensor readings
- Test responses
- Artifacts, specimens, physical samples
- Models, algorithms, scripts
- Content analysis
- Focus group recordings, interview notes
- By Liz Guzman-Ramirez -
