Native Languages Center

Language Documentation Workshop

Module 2:
Documentation and Data Management

  • Module 2 Progress12.5%12.5%

Data Sovereignty: Using the CARE Principles

Indigenous scholars including Dr. Stephanie Russo Carroll, who leads the Data Sovereignty group at the Native Nations Institute, have developed a four-part definition that can be used to structure our work. Below are the four principles in CARE:

Collective Benefit

Materials created, collected, stored, or used in the work are managed in a way to provide maximum benefit to the community.

Authority to Control

Materials created, collected, stored, or used in the work are under the control of the community who make decisions about if, when, where, why, and how these materials are used.

Responsibility

Materials created, collected, stored, or used in the work are clearly and enduringly managed for collective benefit, under community authority, and in a way that aligns with community ethical principles.

Ethics

Community rights, values and well-being - as the community defines these - are of the highest priority.

In essence it is important to design a data management plan to:

  1. provide collective benefit to the communities that our work is serving
  2. create policies and practices that reinforce the authority of appropriate community representatives to oversee the safe storage of and appropriate access to the materials we collect or create
  3. create and maintain responsible systems that ensure that the materials can be safely stored and appropriately accessed based on collective benefit and community control into the foreseeable future
  4. organize documentation work in a way that places the community’s ethics, rights, values and well-being at the highest priority

Resources

CARE Principles

To learn more about the CARE Principles, visit the global CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance site at: gida-global.org/care or refer to this printable document.

Data Curation Network

The Data Curation Network (DCN) is also a good resource. DCN is a collaborative membership organization of data repositories focused on making research data more ethical, understandable, and reusable by the global community. By sharing staff and best practices, the DCN expands curation expertise beyond what individual institutions can provide, enabling the curation of diverse data types to be FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).

DCN also utilizes GitHub to host various educational resources and materials related to data curation. Here is a link to resources for the CARE Principles, Indigenous Data, and Data related to Indigenous Peoples.

Archiving and Data Management

Lastly, another consideration is archiving. This refers to the transferring of data to a less frequently used storage medium. It is a kind of data management system that has well established standards and practices. Having a strong archival plan should be addressed in your Data Management Plan. There are two main places to consider for archiving:

You may have access to local expertise in data management through your institution’s library or archives. This may give you a strong start in thinking about data management planning for your project. Large, external archives can also be of use, and those that have earned the Core Trust Seal, will have expertise in archiving practices that are consistent with data sovereignty principles. We will come back to more detailed discussion of archiving principles in later sections of this module.

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