Agustina Martinez-Garcia
Agustina Martinez-Garcia (MSc, MEng) is a full-time doctoral research student at Liverpool John Moores University, Faculty of Education, Community and Leisure.
Her study concerns the development of models of research archiving by studying practices of qualitative research. The motivations for this work are the unresolved issues that arise during the development of archives for qualitative research. This research project will extend and contribute to existing research in the area of qualitative data management and archiving by examining researcher’s practices. The latter will involve interviews with senior researchers and students participating in small research projects to identify key issues and barriers that researchers face during the research process. This will especially focus on the on the archiving, analysis and re-use of data collected, which will allow one to determine the role of technologies in each of these stages of the process.
While her PhD studentship is not attached to the major ESRC/EPSRC project Ensemble, the work of the project has highlighted some key issues and challenges that arise during the development of qualitative archives, through its continuing engagement with teaching and learning settings in which it uses visual methods, ethnographies and participant research among others. Therefore, it provides the technological and methodological context for her study, as well as offering potential research sites.
Additionally, Agustina is one of the members of the International ‘Qualitative Data Exchange’ working group, which aims to develop technological tools for qualitative data exchange. The group is formed by researchers and archivists from various European countries working on qualitative research projects and archives. An important part of Agustina’s study will be to investigate current data management practices and archival procedures carried out by researchers during qualitative research projects. Ongoing work carried out in the working group has highlighted important unresolved issues within certain areas of qualitative archiving, which could be enhanced with the use of new digital repositories and semantic technologies. Those areas focus primarily on: a) the implementation of appropriate data documentation frameworks, b) analysis of the role of documentation standards in the Social Sciences, c) integration of those documentation standards with archiving systems and d) the development of tools that will facilitative data sharing, reuse and dissemination.
Agustina’s supervisors at Liverpool John Moores University are Professor Patrick Carmichael, Dr. Dhiya Al-Jumeily and Professor Ian Stronach.
Publications
Corti, L., Carmichael, P., and Martinez, A. (2009) What lies beneath? Building a repository for complex collections with semantic web tools Presentation given at Annual International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology
Carmichael, P. and Martinez, A. (2009) The Ensemble Project Lunchtime presentation given at the Economic and Social Data Service, Colchester, 16th March 2009
Martínez García, A. (2009). Design patterns applied to the organisation of digital learning objects repositories. RED (Revista de Educación a Distancia), online Journal, year IX, special issue of e-learning patterns and generative learning objects (November, 2009).
Martínez García, A. (2009). e-learning standards. In Towards the construction of e-learning communities of practice (pp. 201-223). UNAM FES-Z, 2008.
