Organised by the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM), MethodsCon: Futures is a free, in-person event that will take place over two days in Manchester, UK on 12-13 September 2024.
About the conference
MethodsCon: Futures 2024 will provide a unique opportunity for attendees to engage with, explore and develop futures, with a particular focus on themes that are likely to have significant impact on humanity’s development over the next decades.
The event will be part conference, part learning opportunity and part innovation forum, with more than 30 sessions spread over two days. It has been designed to connect and energise people with a focus on futures and follows on from the success of the first MethodsCon in 2022.
Programme
Attendees will be able to take part in workshops and interactive seminars, hear from a variety of experts and collaborate with researchers and professionals from different sectors and disciplines. Topics will include:
- Futures methodologies
- Inclusive and equitable futures
- Health technologies
- Socio-environmental change
- AI, society and social science concerns
See the MethodsCon: Futures programme
CLOSER’s presence at the conference
Our Data Discoverability team attended the conference and ran the following sessions:
Maximise your research potential: a beginner’s guide to FAIR metadata – Hayley Mills, CLOSER
FAIR data is a focus for all funders, whether in the UK, Europe or further afield. For instance, “UKRI aims to achieve open research data that is ‘findable’, accessible, interoperable and re-useable (UKRI Open research).”
Whilst creating FAIR meta(data) is primarily the responsibility of archives, journals and repositories, researchers need to be aware of and be prepared to provide the right information for them. The session will equip you to understand the core principles of data and metadata, and how metadata not only benefits access to your data, but helps you to think about how you use and discover research data.
Access the ‘Maximise your research potential: a beginner’s guide to FAIR metadata’ slides [PDF]
Future Data Services 2 – Convened by Mark Elliott, University of Manchester and Jon Johnson, CLOSER
Session 2.A: Enhancing Data Accessibility and Security through Innovative Data Synthesis (EDASIDA)
One bottle neck in the discoverability pipeline for data is the availability of teaching datasets. This is particularly acute for data that is stored in a virtual research environment where the access restrictions make the production of teaching datasets problematic. This adds to the ‘hurdle height’ for potential new users. In principle, synthetic data produced by the data services themselves are an option, but there are two conflicting issues, risk and utility. A preliminary study conducted at Manchester in collaboration with Administrative Data Research UK demonstrated the feasibility of generating synthetic datasets with high utility and low risk (even achieving zero marginal risk). The essential idea is to start from output that has been cleared for publication by a service and to use the parameters of that output (model coefficients, sufficient statistics etc.) as the objective function for a genetic algorithm for data synthesis. In this session, we will describe the results of these initial studies before outlining a further extension of the work which uses the synthetic data created using this approach to assess the disclosure risk of the output itself. This potentially addresses another issue with TREs, the informality and inconsistency of output checking procedures. Again, our initial results here are very promising. Building on earlier work (Elliot et al 2023), we have discovered that comparable risk measures, akin to those applied to microdata, can be potentially employed. The envisioned goal is to modernize and automate the output checking process
Session 2.B: Extraction and Utilisation of Metadata from Non-machine-actionable Documents to Improve Data Curation and Discovery
We will describe the rationale for our approach, results of prior work and how that relates to the development of new methods to improve metadata uplift in survey and biomedical instruments.
Further information
For further information about this conference, please visit the MethodsCon website.