Open Science and artistic research

Open Science is a hot topic. One of the things that is included in it is the idea of allowing research data to be accessible by other researchers, as well as the public. There are man levels of this, some which are discussed in this article. Another relevant resource is The ORD Strategy Council. Here is one specifially geared towards the arts.

For artistic research it is undoubtedly slightly more complex. The amount of data can quickly spiral out of hand. Video and audio file editing, for example, can quickly generate thousands of files, none of which may be of great interest to anyone, not even the researcher (this is an issue obviously shared by many research disciplines). Hence, there is an element of sorting here, defining what is relevant and what is not. Only the researcher can do this, and this is one of the reasons documenting research data is opposed to by researchers. It simple just adds to the work load, which for most researchers is already quite heavy.

However, if we disregard this for a moment, imagine an environment where all the data from your previous and present research, indexed and searchable, is only a click away. I personally can certainly see the benefits of this, and can be prepared to add the extra time. The condition, however, is that the database for storing this stuff allows for media files to be indexed and meta data should be added somewhat automatically (a fairly simple AI could detect changes in the audio or video). Being able to reference audio and video files would be a big step forward for the field of artistic research which is currently suffering from a lack of inter-references.