 It's Nathan for inviting me. I, as Nathan said, I'm standing, I'm kind of cut price Professor Simpson for the afternoon to talk about our ESE funded project Roads and the Politics of Thought. Having listened to the day's presentations, I feel that I might be taking you down a slightly different road, not just in terms of the technical sophistry of data management that's been discussed thus far, so in terms of, I'm looking at it from the data collection first hand and then into the kind of ways in which we're dealing with this in and first and foremost anthropological and ethnographic research project. So, this is a five year ESE research project that is somewhat interdisciplinary, involves another university, I'm from the University of Edinburgh, and has a couple of PhDs, postdocs, two co-ires and a PI working on it, and it's also regional in terms of its focus on South Asia, and it engages ethnographically with the development of road infrastructure particularly across the region. So, it's broad in scope and involves a lot of data, and an ethnographic project involves data collection of up to a year or so in the field. So, what I think, the kind of point that I want to put across today, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about the projects, because in an ethnographic and an anthropological project what's really important here is understanding the context in which the data is gathered to consider the way in which the data is used, and also when we start to talk about what are normally field notes scribbled down in leatherback journals, typically when those fieldwork notes become to be talked of as data. Finally, the kind of institutions, informants and participants that come into our research have got certain particular interests in marshalling the kinds of conversations that are had around them. So, we're dealing with quite sensitive data in that sense, and also opposing voices. So, when we reveal our data, and when we don't, is also something to be considered. Okay, so, let me just go through the overview, and I'm talking about the individual field sites as we go through, and I'll try and take them one by one to give you a sense of the kind of research that we've been doing. In so, to kind of talk about the way in which we have to look after, share, hold and collect our data. I'm going to talk about what constitutes data and when we refer to it as data, and then how the data moves through the project lifecycle. Finally, if there is time, I've got really kind of set of open questions really about what happens to data at the end of a project, particularly when people move off it. But say for example, later on down the line, they have to re-engage with that data because they've got corrections on whatever articles they've put in. What are the kind of rules about that? Again, an open question really. So, the research sites. Reunion Island, which is where Professor Simpson's been doing some work. Pakistan, Sri Lanka, India and the Maldives. So, I'm going to go through each of these sites one by one. So, in all of these places, to varying degrees, there have been huge amounts of energy and finance put into road infrastructure and ideas of connectivity involving actors such as the World Bank and the international finance corporations, various ex-inbanks and then a kind of government level finance ministries down to the business owners who are setting up stalls down to peasant farmers who are being kind of pushed off their lands because rent prices have gone up and so forth. So, there's a lot of different kind of scales at which we've been kind of gathering and absorbing data along the way. So, starting in Pakistan for example, this is Taw Parker, which is a district in the province of Sind in south-eastern Pakistan. It's near the Indian border and this is a researcher who's doing a project on a 400 kilometre stretch of road to an open cold field out in the middle of nowhere to Karachi itself. In this particular research, he's been looking exactly at the kind of people who have been making their businesses along this. This is a road that's come out of a neoliberal vision and kind of conjures up all sorts of ideas about modernity. So, the people who are interested in this road are not only the cold field miners, not only the local authorities in Karachi, but also the various people who for a long time been kind of moving up and down different stretches of this road throughout history. This is a political project as well. So, when talking to local government agencies and so on and so forth, the interviews that are conducted in data gathering, how they're handled, this is a politically kind of sensitive issue as well because there are lots of things to kind of be taken into consideration in terms of anonymity and protecting that especially. So, moving on from Pakistan, we've got the next project which takes place largely in the Jaffna Peninsula and focuses in one element of the road called the A9 which stretches through what was the area most affected by Sri Lanka's 30-year civil war. So, in this context, you've got a road that's built in a post-conflict situation. So, you've got various people who are accessing new areas of this area, new areas but having gained new access to areas of this region. There's been displacement on ethnic and religious lines and there's also been the interests of the government in building road projects and expansion into an area that was once held by a terrorist organisation and then there is the LTTE and then there is the interests of the army and so on and so forth. So, collecting data in this, doing anonymous interviews, moving hard drives with recorded files of those interviews with those people's voices that are still locatable, getting consent to do the research, to do that's not written but verbal, meeting it in a way that makes sense to the field but also prescribes to the ethical concerns laid out in the ASA and in the various institutions as well. It's something that's had to be taken in consideration. This is research of a kind of political nature as well. In India, what we've been looking at here is a huge amount of data because it involves a research project which isn't a project, sorry, it's a road programme that involves about 50,000 subcontractors building I think 40, something like 20 or 30 billion US dollars worth of rural roads that connect to larger highways in India which is a flagship programme of the Indian government based on a kind of idea about economic development and connecting rural areas up to larger markets. So, our research at doing work here is dealing with government agents, bureaucracies, as well as the World Bank as well as the people from these rural locations visiting these areas, spending time with the people who live there but also spending a lot of time in the bureaucratic offices and being part of that machinery. So, that's a kind of sense of the sort of data that's being collected in this programme and it's huge. Similarly, sorry, I should mention as well, there's not only interview based data and participation, cornerstones of ethnographic work but there's also a lot of secondary data to do with the kind of wealth of documents that come out of the development industry itself as well as the kind of political publications and the newspaper, the press, everything that kind of falls away from a large road programme. And then finally, here we go, the Maldives, which is where I've had the pleasure of being for a year during my research. There's a saying that researchers get the sites that they deserve. But anyway, so I was looking at the Maldives and the different scales of this research project meant travelling to lots of the islands that are all occupied, inhabited islands and some of them were about covering small roads in these islands with tar in the name of development as well. So, for this research I worked with vulnerable migrant labour from Bangladesh, Sri Lankan outsourced companies that were managing this, the local island agencies who were managing the Sri Lankan outsourced contractors and then the central government, as well as the exiled government in Sri Lanka as well to kind of build a bigger picture of why is it that these island roads are being covered in tarmac, what's behind this. As well as these kinds of roads, I also looked at some of the large connectivity projects as well which involved the interests of China and larger players also. This is a road that's about 15 kilometres long on the Maldives largest atoll which is here connecting a couple of those, three or four of those islands in yellow over on that side. So, the kind of data collection that we've all been involved in, as I've mentioned before, structures and semi-structured interviews and participant observation as well as dealing with all of the different scales kind of over a long period of time gathering this all up, we've also been kind of taking photographs and making films of the roads and various ways which I'll come on to later. So, right. Sorry, probably should have snapped off that side a little sooner. So, some of the interviews that we've done have been, as all of you who have done research, they sort of move between being structured, semi-structured and completely opportunistic which is when you get your chance to talk to the person that you seem significant and you jump on it and there's not always the kind of research data collection that you do in the cut and thrust of active research is not always easily kind of folded into the kind of operational way that it's put down in the research manuals and so forth. So, we've got the film side of it which has been, for some of the researchers, this has been kind of putting the camera on the vehicles as they move through and document the road development. Some have been filming interviews within vehicles on the move and I gave the cameras to the research participants to attach to their motorbikes to kind of film the condition of the island roads as they went round and what they perceived to be kind of dangerous or how they used their vehicles. And in this, the data, how did it move? Well, it went from the cameras and their phones that they had for themselves into the project as well as the go-pros that we gave them. We sat down and we collected the films together they got copies as well and we looked through them to do a sort of rough edit in the field and then moving on from that, we, I'll just stay on this one for a second, so then moving on from this, we uploaded them onto an archive, a digital media platform run out of Mumbai which I'll come on to talk to in a little later. So the data, the ownership, the creation and the production, the lines of this all get a little bit blurred as we kind of go through the project. So, and then the other, I guess the other forms of data we've been looking at archives and online collections and this can be like buildings or tarot files with online articles or clips to YouTube videos and so on and so forth. So there's a kind of a massing of data from different levels throughout the project. So, what is data? As an anthropologist and as an ethnographer, first and foremost, data for me throughout my PhD and within this project, it was always referred to as field notes and it was what I spent my evenings writing up. It's what I scratched down on smaller bits of paper throughout the day as I spent time with my informants. Ethnographic research requires a lot of hanging out, deep hanging out as it's otherwise referred to and it's a kind of long term generous engagement with the field that's often hard to translate or describe in something the length of a PhD thesis. Never mind something the length of a journal article. So you kind of have to be a bit selective about this data but the method of writing it up, you get this huge amount to kind of start with. But I would never at that stage of my research start calling it data, to be honest. And then the other stuff that we're dealing with, as I mentioned, filming and some photographs, which never had any for me anyway, any real systematic, I'd see these things, I'd take photographs of them, they would go into a file on my computer under photographs of. And then that would be kind of the level at which it would work. As I said before, this isn't as sophisticated as some of the conversations that have happened earlier today. So what stage of analysis are my field notes and my scratch notes? What stage do they become data room or what stage do they become shareable? It's really difficult to say, I mean I wouldn't necessarily offer out my field note books, that's not a practice in anthropology that's often done, although there are some moves towards that. There are a lot of anthropologists and ethnographs to keep their field notebooks very close to them. What they work at being open access is these nice prose that kind of come out at the end. And that's not just out of vanity for wanting to show people that you can write well. So on and so forth, but in our kind of research it's also a sort of safety concern as well because working through issues of anonymity, working through phrasing the kinds of arguments that you want to make and the kind of positions that you want to take is important. Because as I said initially you're dealing with or we are dealing with institutions who are very concerned about the kind of public discussions that are going on around them. So your kind of early ramblings in the field of what you feel is going on need to be kind of worked through over time. So my kind of open question is at what point in that time when you belong to a project like this do you allow that to be open? Because there are all sorts of things you could leave yourself hostage to fortune about. So then how does the data move through the research project life cycle? So we have a PI at the top, then two CoIs belonging to two different institutions but four postdocs and a couple of PhDs. We also have a local partner which is a Mumbai based film arts collective. So when we have data we have what? We have word files written up, kind of notes that we've taken whilst we were in the field. We've got files that are collections of photographs that we've taken. We've got some media files of the interviews that we've done that we are yet to transcribe because we're still in the middle of nowhere. We've got maybe some early film footage as well. So when we share it between my line manager and me we had the VPN that the university provided that worked with varying degrees of success in very rural locations. And then we had a Microsoft One drive that was preferred over the Dropbox because it wasn't hosted within the EU. And so for a large amount of time the data that I'd collected would be sitting on my laptop or sitting if I was being particularly good it would be on an external hard drive. And when we share data between the two of us it was often over email. It was largely over VPN but I guess more commonly over email this is what I've written up about this particular place so far. Which is possibly in contravention to some of the ways in which data I'm sure will hurt more from Helen tomorrow but the way in which data should be moving but in the kind of rough and tumble of active research that's the way it tends to move. And data moves horizontally among the postdocs as we share the work. So I've been back in the UK since April and we're now in a stage where we're kind of getting our papers together and working through stuff so we're sharing data horizontally between us and up between ourselves and our PIs. But the data also moves, I'm going to just keep referring to it as data now, it also moves outside of the project but within the institutions. So a PhD student who's part of this ERC project might have another supervisor who belongs to the same university but isn't written into the ERC project in the same way. And then we share outside the project again when we give briefings and so forth to the Mumbai-based film collective who are written in to be part of the project. And where is data kept? Well in terms of how we write it, how the kind of written stuff and the databases that we've made of YouTube videos or online materials. That's one thing. The film data however, if I've lined these slides up properly is kept on an online archive run by this Mumbai-based artist collective called CAMP and it's done on a system called PADMA which is interactive and it lets our research participants also take part in editing the films as well so they get a login and they can just go through and they can make whatever changes, add labels, do some transcripts as well. So they become kind of involved in the research making it kind of look polished. Not just the research but the project outcomes as well. So the film stuff is kept here. The system is called PADMA. The technology behind it I'm afraid I can't tell you much about but it's online and you'll be able to have a little look at that. I just know how to put the stuff on there. Okay and then I guess I'm almost getting us back on. So I'll just briefly say something about dissemination here. Written outputs. So coming at this as a postdoc there are kind of two agendas, great. There are two agendas that seem to battle against one another. One is that we have to have written outputs in high-ranking peer-review journals impactful and all of this. But the other one is the data has got to be accessible as well to the information and the outputs to the researchers and there's a responsibility to make it available as well out with the parameters of the paywall journal system in the UK. So making something open access but maintaining the obligations to not only the project but also if you want to get some permanent employment then you want to have these kinds of journal articles as well. So that's one kind of thing going on here. The other kind of dissemination is the project website which gives as a website often does around a project a snapshot. In terms of data sharing after data collection it's worked out through these two main points as well as the films. So I think that's basically not to labour it. It's to give you a kind of journey through our road project and the kinds of things that we've been researching the way in which we've been researching them the way in which we've been understanding data and collecting it and then thinking about the risks and implications of the way we disseminate it. So yeah, thanks very much.