Introduction

This chapter introduces the main ideas of the book. Qualitative data archiving and reuse have increased in recent years. At the same time, qualitative data can increasingly be collected from online sources such as blogs, online forums, and social media. When researchers analyze big social data, this could be seen as qualitative data reuse—that is, researchers are repurposing and recontextualizing big social data to answer research questions. Using this similarity as a starting point, this book identifies six key issues that are held in common between qualitative data reuse and big social research, focusing on data curation implications of each issue—context, data quality and trustworthiness, data comparability, informed consent, privacy and confidentiality, and intellectual property and data ownership. The book then presents the results of interviews with three communities of practice who are engaged with social research and social data: qualitative researchers who have shared or reused data, big social researchers, and data curators. The book suggests that comparing data curation practices for qualitative data reuse and big social research can help researchers responsibly scale up their research practices.