Climbié Inquiry Data Corpus Online: JISC Final Report (Public Report)

Executive Summary

The Climbié online corpus

The Victoria Climbié Inquiry Data Corpus Project at the University of Huddersfield has undertaken work coding and annotating the witness statements from the Victoria Climbié Inquiry. The project took this large, analysed data set (in the form of an Atlas.ti project) and made it available via the University Repository (http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/4842/). The data set was converted to XML for deposit in the repository. Functions were developed to allow users not only to search the data in the normal fashion but to retrieve ‘tagged’ passages of text in the fashion common to qualitative data analysis and to link these retrievals with other metadata and contextual information. These data are of central interest to researchers in child welfare, professional and legal studies, public administration and politics as well as teachers and students of a range of subjects, such as health care and social work, who deal with child welfare and to professionals needing to develop management and administrative skills in child welfare. The project investigated the technical issues involved in depositing and making available a data set such as this and evaluated its utility and utilisation by researchers, learners and professionals.

Web access to the corpus is available at http://victoriaclimbie.hud.ac.uk/. There are two main sections to the website:

A set of pages with information about the inquiry, its background, the people involved and the research literature it has generated

Suggestions, in both a teaching and a research context of how data might be retrieved and what kinds of teaching exercise and what kinds of research projects this might be used to support

Further publicity articles will be available via the website and the Repository at a future date.

The conclusions drawn from the project are:

The Repository is not the best way to archive and retrieve the coded data set due to usability and robustness problems. In short the data set was so large, retrieval of the sub sets was taking too long to make it practical. Hence the Repository now operates as gateway for storing the full data set

There is a difference between coding for research and teaching and learning. The coding for research would be in depth, interpretative, analytical coding for specific use by the particular researcher. For teaching, training and learning the coding has been applied in order for the user(s) to gain access to the different themed subsets which then can be analysed in much the same manner used by a research focus

This would appear to be the best/most appropriate way forward for coding of data because the data set is accessible, usable and can be tailored to meet the specific requirements of the different users

There are several exciting possibilities for use and development of the materials produced. These are:

additional coding on the data set

development for teaching application

development for training application within the care sector

evaluation of the use of the data set by both academics and practitioners

update the data set held in the Repository

coding of other similar data sets for use in academia and the relevant community