Data access & conditions

European Cooperation in Social Science Data Dissemination

5. Putting Data into Historical Context

Creating a unified comparative database has been most successful in the past if guided by substantive interest in a particular domain. Scholars from different countries with interest in comparative research pooled their efforts to this end. As examples from election research show, it is not sufficient to have well documented national collections of the major election studies. Familiarity with national specifics and historical events is needed to document the context knowledge necessary for proper interpretation of the results. The development of topic specific knowledge systems covering the most relevant empirical data sets, metadata information, context knowledge, original questionnaires, actual election results, bibliographic references, graphs, tables and abstracts of publications based on the respective data come close to the ideal information base of social science workstations - the electronic state of the art report in a multimedia world.

Experiences from integrating more than 200 data sets from 25 years of empirical research in former German Democratic Republic in the holdings of the Zentralarchiv at Cologne emphasise the importance of documenting context and interpretation knowledge together with the time and space coordinates of the respective study. We had earlier examples from the Simulmatics project [16]. As Umberto Eco [17] states in his theory of semantics with reference to the rise and fall of political systems, the meaning of statements or symbols can be changed up to its extreme contrary by controlling the context in which it is placed.