SHARE YOUR DATA

Migration data involve a domain of items, events, individuals, or other things, including their properties and states. People, their journeys, experiences, outcomes, and situations may be represented and measured through such data. There are various examples of how to create such representation and measurement, such as statistical databases, oral histories, recordings, or administrative files and other records. Essentially, data serve to encapsulate the realities of the experiences migrants have, but they can also extend to related things in the world. In general, data can come from primary, or the immediate, or secondary, second-hand, sources. Migration data can also exist in different media, such as physical or electronic records, and therefore may have different formats as well. You can find examples of these different media forms in our Data Catalogue. Each Data Drop includes its own description to summarise its data, in addition to describing how the data are structured and work.

Although there has been a proliferation of data related to international migration in recent years, many of those data remain unpublished or otherwise difficult for the broader public to access. Additionally, even where migration data do exist, they are in many cases decentralised or hard to sort through in order to use. Haven provides a haven for such data from our collaborators and contributors.

There are many benefits to sharing data for contributors and publics alike. For contributors, sharing data with Haven allows for curation, preservation, and dissemination of their important work, in addition to helping to represent and understand the lived realities of migrants themselves. For publics, sharing migration data promotes ease of use and clarity for research, accessibility and reproducibility of results, promotion of research, provision of empirical information for evidence-based policy, and continued sharing of culturally-significant information. In general, there are significant benefits in migration data and sharing beyond simple replication.

We curate, preserve, and share data at Haven only per the request of collaborators or contributors. To do this, we use a data management plan that specifies how data are to be collected, organised, managed, archived, and shared during the course of their lifecycle. Since this archive’s primary contribution is to provide a space for migration data, efficient, timely, and consistent data management are invaluable.

Data that are shared with Haven may be kept public or private per the request of their contributors. When data are shared with us, our team reviews the data, performs any necessary cleaning and processing, and, with the contributors’ permission, stores it on a virtual, secure server using best practises in data management. Contributors maintain their intellectual rights over their work, meaning that they have the ability to steward what happens to the data in the long term – or to pass this responsibility to the Lab itself.

Where data are shared and produced into a data drop, then additional materials related to them may also be solicited. Each data drop includes further resources for the benefit of those wishing to use or learn from them, such as webinars, podcasts, and blog posts. Collaborators and contributors may choose to submit these or work with Haven to create them as well.

To share your data, use the form provided immediately above or below this page or reach out to Haven via our “Get in Touch” page. You can access this page using the top-right menu under “Participate”. You can also contact us for more information on sharing data with Haven using the Get in Touch page.