Organisation/Institution: Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw, Poland)
Department/Team: Nowa Panorama Literatury Polskiej (New Panorama of Polish Literature)
Stakeholder: Agnieszka Szulińska
Facilitators: Mateusz Franczak, Barbara Wachek
Date of interview with stakeholder: 18 July 2022
For the purpose of testing the implementation process of the Open Badges designed within the framework of the OBERRED project, a team from the Institute of Literary Research selected from among the teams of their Institute the New Panorama of Polish Literature (Nowa Panorama Literatury Polskiej). NPLP and TEI NPLP are platforms for the presentation of research results in the digital environment. As for NPLP, it consists of separate collections (‘enhanced’ digital monographs), each telling a different “scholarly story” and using a distinct way of presenting content. In the case of TEI NPLP, it is a platform and an editor for creating digital scholarly editions. It supports various levels of critical apparatus, has collating features and uses an international standard, Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).
The team of the New Panorama of Polish Literature includes researchers of literature and culture, graphic designers and typographers. (According to types of RDM actors and stakeholders as acting stakeholders from NPLP in particular we consider researchers).
In order to learn about the needs of the NPLP team and the possible implementation of the Open Badges, facilitators interviewed its member – Agnieszka Szulińska who is an experienced digital scholarly editor responsible for Research Data Management issues. Facilitators wanted to find out what competencies a digital editor joining the NPLP team should have and how to convince the team leader to implement Open Badges.
Based on the Practical Guide, facilitators explained what Open Badges are and how they can support competence management. After that Agnieszka Szulińska noted the need to implement Open Badges for trainees at NPLP. Due to the fact that there is little talk of Open Science and RDM in Polish philology studies she sees a demand to supplement knowledge about them for those starting their internships. She also said that Open Badges would help to introduce the issues which would also be useful for other teams and departments. She emphasised that so far the NPLP team haven’t let trainees work on the backend – they’ve been working only in Google Docs (they gave them severely restricted access to data). Open Badges could speed up the introduction of these people into the team and improve workflows.
She did not need to be convinced of the advantages of implementing Open Badges. She herself listed the following advantages:
- easily introducing persons to the basics of an issue e.g. Open Science
- a good form of learning for people who feel ashamed of their lack of knowledge
- free of charge
- ability to add a badge to the LinkedIn profile
- badges are based on a gratification mechanism (like achievements/trophies in computer games)
Moreover, she sees the potential in implementing Open Badges in the use of tools, data and basics of digital humanities (because of the lack of digital humanities curriculum in Polish studies course).
When it comes to convincing stakeholders to implement Open Badges she does not see this as a difficulty. She said that the tool which they use in work is still developing and therefore requires team members to create new courses from time to time. She remarked that using ready frameworks seems to be more effective than customising own badges due to additional time required for customisation but she doesn’t exclude this option. According to her, Open Badge courses would satisfy the existing need to train new trainees. And in terms of open access they could be useful also for people outside her team and institution.
She identified specific competencies that a person starting out in their team should have, for example, a willingness to work in CMS and with data structures, knowledge of website construction (XML), experience in digital annotation and data analysis, ability to search for information and completed a critical editing course. After that she was introduced to the FRAMEWORK OF RDM COMPETENCES & SKILLS and she selected those that would be crucial to her team:
| FRAMEWORK OF RDM COMPETENCES & SKILLS FOR THE DIGITAL EDITOR | BADGES | |
|---|---|---|
GENERAL COMPETENCES Stages of the RDM lifecycle competences grouping | COMPETENCES | Badge N° |
| Plan and design | F.A.I.R. data | A3 |
| Data Management Plan (DMP) | A4 | |
| Data Description | Describe data | C9 |
| Data formatting and storage | Organise data | D10 |
| Data quality assurance | Clean and normalise data | E13 |
| Assess data quality | E14 | |
| Data processing and analysis | Integrate data | F15 |
| Analyse data | F16 | |
| Data Reproducibility | F17 | |
| Publication and discoverability | Publish data | H20 |
| Disseminate data | H21 | |
| Data discoverability | H22 |
The full Framework is available here:OBERRED Skills FRAMEWORK (Erasmus+)
Conclusions and next steps:
- Open Badges would help to onboard new persons in the NPLP team, especially those shortly after graduation, without much experience in digital scholarly editing .
- The NPLP team is keen to make use of frameworks in the future and will also adapt existing frameworks to its needs if necessary.
- The next step for the facilitators should be to convince the decision maker (team leader of NPLP) and take the next steps in helping to implement the badges.
- In the next stage, the NPLP team will consider preparing its own badges, specifying the additional competences required for the work of a digital editor.