D9.2 Midterm evaluation report

Three of the Tasks in WP9 (Data Communities) are associated with particular user communities. These are Ethnic and Migration Studies (associated with T9.2), Electoral Studies (associated with T9.3), and Heritage Science (associated with T9.4). Each of these three tasks has as a major part of its remit the production of services, tools, procedures and data of direct relevance for their respective user communities. This report provides an overview of the state of development of these products, and of the extent to which they are available to the user communities in question. A detailed reporting of the extent of usage in these communities, and of the feedback thereby engendered will be presented in the report of Deliverable D9.3, at the end of 2021.

This report describes for each of these tasks the major activities undertaken in the construction of their respective services, tools, procedures and data, and the current state of development for each of these.

The major product that has been generated by Task T9.2 (Ethnic and Migration Studies) is the EMM Survey Registry. This Registry is by now fully developed in terms of its structure and functionality, and the currently available version is a publicly accessible beta version. It is also very well developed in its coverage of surveys, with information from more than 1200 surveys from almost 30 countries having been ingested, with many more being added in the near future. It has already been used by 300-400 unique researchers from different sectors (academe, industry, administration) and countries.

The second major activity of T9.2 consists of a feasibility study of developing an EMM Question Data Bank (QDB) as part of the CESSDA-led European Question Bank. It is thus quite possible that such an EMM-QDB will eventually be developed into a product available to the user community, but that is not a commitment in the current SSHOC project.

As far as T9.3 (Electoral Studies) is concerned, the main product to be developed is a Knowledge Graph (KG) in Electoral Studies. This product has been developed into an alpha version that is based on a large volume of ingested material (almost datasets and almost 4000 publications). The structure and functionality of the KG as specified in the design stage is operational, but subject to further improvement and refinement. A first stage of testing has been concluded with a small panel of expert users, which flagged up various issues to be implemented in an enhanced way before further testing and wider access in the user community can productively be undertaken. The implementation of these enhancements is currently under way.

For T9.4 (Heritage Science) the main product to be developed is a digital platform –named RESTORE– that allows the recovery, integration and reuse of existing digital materials of different kinds (e.g., archival, museal, textual, artefactual) and stored using a variety of standards. This platform is to be piloted in the context of a project centered on the 14th/15th century merchant Datini. The platform has been fully specified and developed into an alpha version.