Karen Nourse

Research project

Supporting Open Science Through the Curation of Open Government Data (OGD) in Migration Studies

Project summary

My fellowship at Iméra will consist of both practitioner work and original research within the domain of Open Government Data (OGD). I will work with an Aix Marseille Université faculty colleague to make enhancements to an existing online amU resource (PUD-amU) which supports migration studies research. My colleague and I will also conduct two studies, one mixed methods and one qualitative, to understand how researchers use OGD in their teaching and research.

The Open Science Movement

My work on this project directly supports the goals of the open science movement, an approach which began to be popularized during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Open science supports the unencumbered access to systems which facilitate research and education. Today’s open science has expanded to include several areas: the open exchange of research findings (“open access”), educational materials (“open educational resources”), software and source code (“open source”), the scholarly peer review process (“open peer review”), and data (“open data”). My project seeks to promote the proliferation of open science at Aix Marseille Université, specifically through increased user access to open data.

“Open data” is data collected by researchers and subsequently made available to others through online repositories. This approach accelerates the pace of scientific discovery and ultimately builds public trust in research through data integrity. In my home country of the United States, researchers are encouraged through federally funded grant mandates to make their data open. Such mandates pertain to researchers who collect their own original data (“primary data”) through traditional means such as laboratory observations, survey data, or interviews with study participants.

Open Government Data in Migration Studies

Beyond the primary data created by researchers during their investigations, there also exists secondary data which has been produced by government research entities who collect, analyse and distribute data. Termed “open government data” or OGD, this secondary data generated by government agencies and their affiliated institutions is open for use by researchers. OGD is both expansive in scope as well as reputable, and it is well-suited for many research applications but particularly within the discipline of migrant studies. Census records, labour statistics, healthcare outcomes, and educational attainment statistics are just a few of the many freely available OGD regularly produced by governments of different countries.

Research generated in the discipline of migration studies frequently draws upon OGD. The literature abounds with recent European studies that have used OGD to study important migrant issues such as their health outcomes (Kottova & Tepperova, 2024; Muller et al., 2022; Stanek et al., 2020), family formation issues (Sichling, 2024), and labor outcomes (Borjas & Monras, 2017; Gilmartin & Dagg, 2022). American research on migrant studies has used OGD to examine these same issues as well as educational outcomes (Colon et al., 2022), crime (Frost, 2015; Snowden, 2019), and economic/wealth outcomes (Keister & Aronson, 2017; Lo et al, 2019; Obeng-Odoom, 2019). Although researchers in the discipline of migration studies clearly utilize OGD, it cannot be presumed that they know every source of OGD pertaining to their work, nor do they necessarily know the data made available through other countries’ governments. Greater curation and promotion of these OGD could be helpful to researchers studying human migration.

In addition to the data needs of university faculty, one must also consider the research and instructional needs of university graduate students who study issues related to human migration. OGD can be an important teaching tool to use with graduate students in the social sciences who are learning to conduct quantitative data analysis and appreciate real-life data sets which connect to their course material (Evans et al., 2024). OGD can also be a potential source of research data for these early-career researchers, as they lack the funding to collect their own primary research data. Although OGD demonstrates many potential benefits to graduate students, the literature (Crusoe et al., 2019; Lnenicka et al., 2022) indicates that most students lack any familiarity with OGD and must receive clear instruction from their faculty to become proficient users.

Biography

Karen V. Nourse is a tenured faculty member at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, US) holding rank as a Professor. She serves as the Research and Data Librarian within MTSU’s Walker Library, where she assists faculty and students in all phases of the research lifecycle. Karen holds a Ph.D. in Literacy Studies from MTSU, a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and a Master of Science in Education from Radford University.

Beginning her professional experience as a middle school librarian, Karen’s research has examined innovative teaching practices within both school and academic librarianship. She has been the recipient of an American Association of School Librarians Research Grant, was honored with the Best Conference Paper Award at the International Association of School Librarians, and most recently received a research grant from the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium. Her current research seeks to examine the use of open government data in the teaching and research practices of university faculty.