A DataVerse Beyond The Internet

Jorrit Poelen https://jhpoelen.nl

2024-02-06

Guiding Questions

  • How do you cite data?
  • How do you look up cited data now?
  • How do you look up cited data 40 years from now?

There’s A Kitty In The DataVerse…

Harvard Kitty

There’s A Kitty In The DataVerse…

Harvard Kitty Internet Page

So How’d You Cite This Kitty Picture?

Joshua Carp, 2014, “cat.jpg”, CarpTest, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/24358/N4FCVS, Harvard Dataverse, V1 1

How To Retrieve This Kitty Picture Now?

Like this?

curl -L "https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/24358/N4FCVS"\
 > cat.jpg

How To Retrieve This Kitty Picture Now?

Wait a minute …

cat cat.jpg
 | head -n2
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' ?>
<!DOCTYPE html>

That ain’t no cat, it is an HTML page.

How To Retrieve This Cat Picture Now?

Take 2.

  • turn on the internet (still there?)
  • open a web browser
  • load https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/24358/N4FCVS
    • and rely on a delicate and complex socio-technical network
  • inspect page
  • use mouse to click on a link that looks like cat.jpg
  • download image and trust its authenticity

DOI Economics and Redirection

DOI Redirection Sequence Diagram

How To Retrieve This Cat Picture 50 Years From Now?

Joshua Carp, 2014, “cat.jpg”, CarpTest, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/24358/N4FCVS, Harvard Dataverse, V1

Likely will not work due to intricate network of dependencies.

How To Retrieve This Cat Picture 50 Years From Now?

Proposal: Sign the citation 2

… by adding the digital fingerprint of the image.

Joshua Carp, 2014, “cat.jpg”, CarpTest, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/24358/N4FCVS, Harvard Dataverse, V1 hash://md5/7d62417b5b689ed91dcd25f10c9c2132

How To Retrieve This Cat Picture 50 Years From Now?

… by searching the world (in, and beyond, the internet) for the content with the unique fingerprint hash://md5/7d62417b5b689ed91dcd25f10c9c2132 .

  • https://linker.bio/hash://md5/7d62417b5b689ed91dcd25f10c9c2132
  • https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/harvard/?q=fileMd5%3A7d62417b5b689ed91dcd25f10c9c2132
  • preston cat --remote https://dataverse.harvard.edu hash://md5/7d62417b5b689ed91dcd25f10c9c2132
  • preston cat --remote https://dataverse.org hash://md5/7d62417b5b689ed91dcd25f10c9c2132
  • preston cat --remote https://linker.bio,https://dataverse.org hash://md5/7d62417b5b689ed91dcd25f10c9c2132

Let Us Carry Our Cat Pictures Into The Future…

preston cat\
 --remote "https://dataverse.org"\
 hash://md5/7d62417b5b689ed91dcd25f10c9c2132\
 > cat.jpg
Harvard Kitty

Guiding Questions

  • How do you cite data?
  • How do you look up cited data now?
  • How do you look up cited data 40 years from now?

Extra

Internet Is Designed For Exchanging Information

The internet is a powerful tool for exchanging digital information. But the Internet’s contents changes constantly: websites are launched and taken down, webpages change, and content gets archived or lost.3

Internet Is Location-based

By design, a web address, or Uniform Resource Locator (URL), points to a specific internet location from which a resource, like a webpage, can be retrieved. However, a URL does not provide a way to verify that a retrieved webpage was the one we asked for. 4

Finding Content By Their Location Is … Tricky

Imagine using a URL-like reference to find a book at a library: instead of locating a book by what it is (e.g., title, author), you refer to a book by its location (e.g., third shelf on the second row next to the window). With this, a book becomes unfindable if moved to another shelf. And, if you do manage to find a book at the referenced location, how would you know you’ve found the book you are looking for? 5

Finding Content By Their (Summarized) Content Is … What Librarians Do

Instead of pointing to where books are located, librarians point to them using a bibliographic reference. For practical reasons, only a few identifying clues are included in such a reference (e.g., author, year of publication, title, and publisher). So, librarians refer to content by what it is, and knowing where it may be located is secondary. 6

A bibliographic citation:

Darwin, C. 1859. On the Origin of Species. John Murray.

  1. As suggested in https://dataverse.harvard.edu/file.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/24358/N4FCVS accessed on 2024-02-06 https://dataverse.org/best-practices/data-citation↩︎

  2. Elliott M.J., Poelen, J.H. & Fortes, J.A.B. (2023) Signing data citations enables data verification and citation persistence. Sci Data. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02230-y hash://sha256/f849c870565f608899f183ca261365dce9c9f1c5441b1c779e0db49df9c2a19d↩︎

  3. Jorrit Poelen. 2024. Unleashing Digital Knowledge Into The Future. Accessed on 2024-02-06 at https://linker.bio line:hash://sha256/8ac18eb75ff20d40d1d60bb6ad5a745eb528093d1ffbe373e3847c13146091eb!/L12↩︎

  4. Jorrit Poelen. 2024. Unleashing Digital Knowledge Into The Future. Accessed on 2024-02-06 at https://linker.bio line:hash://sha256/8ac18eb75ff20d40d1d60bb6ad5a745eb528093d1ffbe373e3847c13146091eb!/L14↩︎

  5. Jorrit Poelen. 2024. Unleashing Digital Knowledge Into The Future. Accessed on 2024-02-06 at https://linker.bio line:hash://sha256/8ac18eb75ff20d40d1d60bb6ad5a745eb528093d1ffbe373e3847c13146091eb!/L16↩︎

  6. Jorrit Poelen. 2024. Unleashing Digital Knowledge Into The Future. Accessed on 2024-02-06 at https://linker.bio line:hash://sha256/8ac18eb75ff20d40d1d60bb6ad5a745eb528093d1ffbe373e3847c13146091eb!/L18↩︎