Corinne, AFAIK your field (like most of the humanities) has a very casual attitude with respect to documenting research. Exact reproducibility in a quantitative sense is obviously out of the question, so many scholars decide they have no duty to make the reasoning leading to their papers transparent. So, we have no best practice to fall on. The main epistemological move behind SSNA is to treat conversational exchanges as data. That makes it natural to adopt the culture of data stewardship that comes from different communities, in my case the open data community.
When we documented OpenCare, it worked like this.
- At the beginning of the project, we wrote a data management plan. This type of document is now a requirement for EU-funded research.
- Graphryder fetches the data from the edgeryders.eu database via API. So, we documented the API itself. This is our main metadata repository, in that database entity are exemplified, witjh the indication of the fields they contain and an explanation thereof (unless the name of the field is itself explanatory).
- We then exported the data in JSON format, uploaded them on Zenodo. The Zenodo record contains links to the API documentation: opencare data
Do you think it is adequate?