Anna Weichselbraun, Sabine Imeri,Kerstin Klenke, Marcel LaFlamme

Daten und Wissen öffentlichmachen/ Making Data andKnowledge Public

Anna Weichselbraun: Introduction

This round table brought three individuals from different institu-tional and disciplinary perspectives together to discuss the issue ofmaking ethnological data and knowledge public. In recent years, therequirements of various funding bodies to make research data publiclyavailable( requirements which were first applied in the so- called hardsciences) has produced significant resistance in European ethnologyand related fields. The critique rightly points out that the epistemiclogics of the hard sciences( such as reproducibility and verification)are incompatible with those of the social and cultural sciences. Fur-thermore, the requirement to make research data public raises ques-tions about research ethics, consent, authorship, and the nature ofknowledge, and the possibility of relational knowledge productionthat are central to the discipline's self- understanding. The round tablediscussion sought to move beyond these well- worn critiques in orderto determine for whom, for what, and in what ways, making data( and knowledge) public could be fruitful and productive for a criti-cal, reflexive, and collaborative knowledge production in Europeanethnology and related fields. Kerstin Klenke, head of the Phonogram-marchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and trained ethnomusi-cologist, alerted us to the multiple types of publics that must be takeninto account when considering possibilities for making research datapublic. Sabine Imeri, European ethnologist and research associate ofthe Specialised Information Service Social and Cultural Anthropol-ogy, based at the university library of Humboldt University in Berlin,pointed out past practices of collaborative research and data sharing