Nordic research benefits from the sharing of video data

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The Nordic research centre QUINT has embarked on some groundbreaking efforts relating to the sharing of video data for the benefit of researchers throughout the Nordic Region.

Published: 03.02.2022

Facts

The QUALI-FAIR hub

The QUALI-FAIR hub brings together skills from different academic groups, including six faculties and twelve departments at the University of Oslo, experts from the University of Olso’s library, the FAIR@UiO initiative, and the Nordic Centre of Excellence QUINT. All of these groups deal with a wide range of research data, from medical information to field notes, videos, and photographs. This data is context-dependent and often contains personal data about individuals, so there are a number of challenges in reusing the data over time and between different surveys. The hub will work to make this data FAIR-compliant while ensuring its appropriate protection.

What is Open Science?

An umbrella for eight different approaches to how we should use and disseminate information within science. The most well-known approach at the moment is Open Access. Open Access means that we must make sure that everyone can freely read scientific articles and access scientific results without having to pay for them. Although you can freely publish your work, if you want to access what others publish, you have to pay the publisher for it. This is what Open Access is trying to change.

What is Open Data?

Open Data falls under the Open Science umbrella, and means that you can access data that has been collected for both public and private resources.

What is FAIR data?

FAIR stands for findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. The FAIR principles involve making sure that research data is searchable and accessible, that it can be used in a context, and that it is reusable for computers.

Professor Kirsti Klette from the University of Oslo (UiO) heads up the Nordic Centre of Excellence Quality in Nordic Teaching (QUINT), which is funded by NordForsk. Unique to the programme is that she and her colleagues at QUINT have made video data available to researchers throughout the Nordic Region.

At the same time, 80 researchers at the centre already share video data across the Nordic borders via the QUINT LISA Nordic Data Portal, which is located under the Teaching Learning Video Lab at the University of Oslo. Klette states that the sharing of data from the Norwegian version of the project alone has resulted in as many as 47 master’s theses.

Professor Kirsti Klette
Photo: Alex Tufte

QUALI-FAIR Hub

The video lab is a central element in the newly established QUALI-FAIR Hub at the University of Oslo’s Faculty of Educational Sciences. With the QUALI-FAIR Hub, QUINT wants to make context-sensitive research data more accessible to researchers based on the FAIR principles – i.e. findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable – and at the same time ensure the uninterrupted protection of the data. And with the video lab, QUINT has already built a strong skills base around the procedures and infrastructures relating to FAIR data.

QUINT also deals with large amounts of sensitive information in the form of video observation studies from classrooms, so there has been a clear need for better processes for this type of data for some time.

“We’ve seen a huge level of interest from researchers who want access to the data we’ve collected from our classroom studies, but the process of making this data available is complicated. Although there may be legitimate reasons to screen the data that is generated, such as sensitive personal material, often the barriers to data sharing are more to do with technical and administrative procedures as well as a weak, principled mindset associated with data sharing in the HUMSAM subjects,” says Klette, who is initiating the QUALI-FAIR Hub.

Hub provides considerable Nordic added value

NordForsk has long worked on the active promotion of Open Science, as the ability to reuse data can provide considerable Nordic added value. Open Science is about making research open and accessible. When researchers share their research data, other researchers can reuse, redistribute, and reproduce that data and get even more out of it. By allowing other researchers to look at already-available research data from different angles in order to illuminate a scientific problem, new perspectives on the research can emerge.

Director of NordForsk, Arne Flåøyen, is very enthusiastic about the great work that QUINT has put into the sharing of video data.

“It’s great to see how meticulously QUINT has worked on the sharing of video material, as we’re dealing with a different type of research results than those you usually think of when working with Open Science. And we hope that these results can be made available to researchers in all the Nordic countries, and that their use can become even more widespread than it is today.”

According to Flåøyen, the project is a brilliant example of Open Science in practice, and how it creates Nordic added value by encouraging more research.

“With the region’s 27 million inhabitants, a shared Nordic cultural background, and a broadly similar mindset, socially as well as politically, we have a common position. In other words, it’s easy to work together, as we have a common understanding,” he concludes.