How do digital traces of communication become research data? What do researchers need to record so that others can later understand how a corpus was created? And what can be shared in a reusable form when legal or ethical considerations prevent the raw data from being made public?
These questions were explored at our workshop ‘From Digital Corpora to Research Data in Media and Communication Studies’ on 29 May 2026 in Leipzig. The speakers approached a wide range of digital data from different perspectives, including social media posts, private chat messages, digital newspaper archives and large cross-platform corpora.
Several key points recurred throughout the presentations and discussions. If research data are to be reused, the way in which they were created should be carefully documented throughout the project. Even when the data themselves cannot be made openly available, code, metadata and supporting materials can help others understand how results were produced and build new research on existing findings. For FID Media, this raised the question of how we can make existing corpora easier to find and support researchers from the planning stages of their projects.
The full report on the presentations and discussions has now been published on the DHd Blog.