March 6, 2026

DiscussDataLab Workshop Report

A report about our first DiscussDataLab workshop has been published at H-Soz-Kult. The report, written by our intern Friedrich Leis (University of Bremen), summarises the three-day workshop "Challenges of Data Collection, Re-use, and Analysis: Public Opinion, Political Debates, and Protests in the Context of the Russo-Ukrainian War", that was held at FSO Bremen in August 2025. You can read the report here.

Feb. 16, 2026

New Discuss Data Category "Repression"

As the number of datasets dealing with 'repression' reached a critical mass, Discuss Data decided to create a new category for this topic. Jan Matti Dollbaum, who is conducting research on repression, is the curator. All data on repression can now be found in the relevant category.

Jan. 6, 2026

'Caucasus Barometer' now on Discuss Data!

The 'Caucasus Barometer' (CB) is a longitudinal survey of socioeconomic issues and political attitudes in the South Caucasus countries of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Our partner, the Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC), has made available a new dataset providing unique CB data for the years 2008–2024 on Discuss Data.

Nov. 5, 2025

New Data on Repression Against Crimean Tatars

A new dataset on Discuss Data provides rare information on the repression and human rights violations that the Crimean Tatar people have suffered at the hands of the Russian occupying forces in Ukraine between 2014 and 2024. The Crimean Tatar Repression Dataset contains geocoded event data and is available via open access. The scope and context of the data is explained in more detail in a separate working paper by the data owners.

Oct. 1, 2025

Reading Recommendation: Survey Research During War

In a recently published article in Post-Soviet Affairs, Aaron Erlich (McGill University) conducts surveys in Ukraine to learn more about survey research during war. He concludes: "The results demonstrate that, given modern survey techniques, wartime attitudes and behavior in Ukraine can be reliably measured, but there is a trade-off in survey modes between coverage bias and social desirability bias." The article was published online in July 2025 and is available here.

Sept. 26, 2025

Reading Recommendation: Ukrainian Public Opinion on Peace with Russia

A new article by Alina Nychyk and Paul D’Anieri in East European Politics (July 2025, p. 1-23) examines how Ukrainian public opinion shapes potential territorial compromises and peace strategies in the Russo-Ukrainian war. Some of the data mentioned is also available on Discuss Data. The article is available here in open access..

Sept. 16, 2025

Discuss Data on Konkoop DataLab BLOG

The most recent contribution for the DataLab BLOG by the Konkoop research network (https://konkoop.de/) is about Discuss Data. In a short piece, Eduard Klein explains the idea behind Discuss Data, why the platform is becoming an increasingly important safe haven for data from and about Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia, and the services it offers users. Read more here.

Aug. 21, 2025

Program of first DiscussDataLab available

From 25–27 August 2025, Discuss Data will host the inaugural DiscussDataLab. Our Participants and experts will explore the challenges and complexities of research data management in the context of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. The program of the DataLab is available here.

June 11, 2025

Discuss Data Presentation in Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Discuss Data was presented at the workshop / training “Science Excellence in Central Asia: Between SCOPUS Fetishisation, Predatory Journals, and Survival Strategies of Researchers”, held on 11–12 June 2025 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The presentation showcased how Discuss Data helps researchers boost the visibility of their work and access data on Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia, including a live demo of uploading data and tagging metadata.

May 19, 2025

Discuss Data at ZOiS Podcast

Our colleague Felix Herrmann explained in the recent podcast by the Centre for Eastern and International Studies (ZOiS), why research data matters, especially for researching Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where governments use data for surveillance and make it increasingly difficult to access data. The podcast is available here and also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

May 14, 2025

Discuss Data Presentation in Lviv/Ukraine

Discuss Data will be presented at the symposium "The Most Documented War: Enacting Archives", that will be held between 22-24 May in Lviv (Ukraine). Organised by the Center for Urban History, the Institute for Documentation and Exchange (INDEX), Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen and Max Weber Foundation, the symposium brings together international and Ukrainian initiatives documenting the Russian war (crimes) against Ukraine.

March 27, 2025

Newsletter 1/2025 out!

We have sent out the latest newsletter to our subscribers. It contains lots of news and updates from the Discuss Data cosmos. If you would like to have a look, you can access theweb version here. If you'd like to receive our quarterly update automatically in your inbox, you can subscribe to our newsletter here.

Feb. 28, 2025

CfP for Discuss Data "DataLab" Workshop 2025

We're pleased to announce that from 25-27 August 2025 Discuss Data will hold its first "DataLab" - a three-day workshop for early-stage researchers on the challenges of research data management (RDM). The theme of the DataLab, which will take place at the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen (Germany), is "Challenges of Data Collection, Re-use and Analysis: Public Opinion, Political Debates and Protests in the Context of the Russian-Ukrainian War". The deadline for applications is 28 March 2025. Click here to download more information and the application form. The preliminary program will be available online soon.

Nov. 26, 2024

New Opinion Poll Data from Ukraine

Our partner, the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), published a new data set on Discuss Data with their omnibus survey from May 2024. The data provides an interesting insight into the Ukrainian public opinion on issues such as territorial concessions, security agreements, societal unity and critique towards the government, and is in open access.

Nov. 22, 2024

Reading Recommendation: Public Opinion on the Russo-Ukrainian War in Central Asia

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine affects the entire wider region, but we have little knowledge about the mood outside the two warring states. A new article in Post-Soviet Affairs by Hannah S. Chapman and Raushan Zhandayeva sheds light on the public opinion on the war in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Nov. 14, 2024

New Features: Alternative Registration, Zenodo-Integration, and Statistics

Discuss Data has a new alternative registration process for users without institutional email, who can now easily create a local Discuss Data account - see our updated help on how to register a new account. Furthermore, Discuss Data is now integrated with Zenodo, one of the leading repository infrastructures in Europe. Read more about this in our newsletter (that you can subscribe here). And for those interested in numbers: We have finally added views and downloads statistics to every dataset.

Nov. 6, 2024

Reading Recommendation: Irregularities in Russian Economic Statistics

The Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies (BOFIT) has published the policy brief ‘Detecting irregularities in Russian economic statistics’, written by Heli Simola. The author applies simple analytical tools to detect irregularities in Russian economic data that could imply data manipulation. While the analysis reveals irregularities and confirms the increased uncertainty associated with Russia’s statistical data published after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it finds no evidence of extensive systematic data manipulation.

Nov. 5, 2024

Reading Recommendation: New Survey Data Shows Changing Public Opinion in Russia Regarding the War

Sociologist Elena Koneva, founder of ExtremeScan, published new survey data from Russia on the evolution of attitudes toward the war, since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 through Ukraine’s raid into Kursk Region in August 2024. Based on this data, she argues that 2024 broke public support for the war, and that Ukraine's occupation of Kursk region played a major role in this development. The article is available on Russia.Post.

Oct. 30, 2024

New Dataset with Corpora of Websites of Main Russian State Institutions

The new dataset "Russian state institutions full-text datasets" by Giorgio Comai has been published. It includes the text corpora of the websites of the President of Russia, the Prime Minister, the Government, the Parliament, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs until 2023. It is a unique and rich source for researching official Russian politics and is available in open access.

Aug. 5, 2024

Reading Recommendation: Data Secrecy and Data Manipulation in Russia

Issue 314 of the Russian Analytical Digest examines data secrecy and data manipulation in Russia. Mark Harrison argues that Russia has returned to a system of secretive rule, albeit with less censorship and more disinformation than in the Soviet Union. The Cedar collective shows how Russia has gradually rolled back data openness, demonstrating that even in wartime, data closure remains a gradual process and is far from comprehensive. Finally, Nikita Zakharov draws lessons for wartime Russia from a study of manipulation of Covid-19 mortality data.

June 17, 2024

Reading Recommendation: Ukrainian Analytical Digest on Public Opinion Polling

The Ukrainian Analytical Digest (UAD) issue 6 has been published on the topic of "Public Opinion Research in Ukraine under Wartime Conditions". Heiko Pleines and Eduard Klein as well as Inna Volosevych describe the situation of survey institutes in Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion. Volodymyr Paniotto and Serhiy Dembitsky discuss challenges regarding the collection of survey data and provide solutions for obtaining valid data. Serhiy Shapovalov uses survey data to show how Ukraine's society has changed since the full-scale invasion. Ilona Sologoub presents what other data researchers can access. Some of the opinion poll data discussed is available on Discuss Data.

April 23, 2024

Four New Data Sets on Central Asia Published

The Central Asia Barometer (CAB) is a unique source of opinion poll research on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Funded by a Discuss Data Preparation Grant, the CAB team published four open access datasets. These include waves 1-9 (2017-2021) of the Central Asia Barometer Survey, a 2022 survey on Perceptions of Russia-Ukraine War in Kyrgyzstan, a Snap Public Opinion Poll on the Presidential Elections and Referendum in Kyrgyzstan (2020), and the United Central Asia Survey: Obstacles, Opportunities, Prospects (2021).

April 10, 2024

"Discuss Data" Panel at BASEES 2024

On April 6th, the panel "Research Data Quality in Times of War: New Challenges, Questions, and Solutions", initiated by Discuss Data, took place at the BASEES 2024 Annual Conference in Cambridge, UK. Volodymyr Paniotto (Kyiv International Institute of Sociology) shed light on "Methods for Data Quality Assessment in Surveys during the War in Ukraine and Russia". Michael Rochlitz (University of Oxford) provided insights into "Conducting Public Opinion Survey in Russia: Data Quality, Practical Issues and Examples of Recent Research". Eduard Klein (Discuss Data, FSO Bremen) presented "The potential of Discuss Data for research data management and a discussion platform for data quality". And Marnie Howlett (University of Oxford) explored "Methods vs. Ethics When Researching War". The panel was well attended and the discussion that followed was fruitful.

March 18, 2024

VolkswagenStiftung grants "DataReUse" Grant for Discuss Data project

The VolkswagenStiftung has approved an application for a DataReuse project with the participation of Discuss Data. The huge corpus of the Maidan interviews (more than 800 interviews with 1500 hours of recordings), collected within the project "Comparing protest actions in Soviet and post-Soviet spaces" at the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen, will be made available for research on identity formation in Ukraine. As a result, all anonymised transcripts, a comprehensive index and a documentation will be made available on Discuss Data in open access.

March 6, 2024

New data on inter-ethnic prejudice in Ukraine

In the scope of the DFG-funded cooperation between Discuss Data and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), a new longitudinal data set on inter-ethnic prejudice in Ukraine is now available on Discuss Data. The merged data set contains 32 surveys covering the period from 1994 to 2023 and shows the changing attitudes of the Ukrainian population towards specific ethnic groups. The data is available in open access.

Dec. 20, 2023

KIIS-data on (missing) support for Russian accession in Ukraine published

A new data set in the context of the cooperation between Discuss Data and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) was published. The data shows the support for accession to Russia in Southern and Eastern Ukraine in April 2014 and 2021/22 (before the large-scale invasion). In both periods, pro-Russian support was marginal. The data set is available in open access: https://doi.org/10.48320/847E424E-543A-4E95-BD00-60E4C2CC9B9B.

Dec. 5, 2023

Article with Dataset from Discuss Data Published

A new paper that uses a dataset from Discuss Data has been published in Government & Opposition: In his article "Towards an Antiwar Transnational Populism? An Analysis of the Construction of ‘the Russian People’ in Volodymyr Zelensky's Wartime Speeches" (available in open access), Seongcheol Kim analyses Zelensky's speeches directed to the Russian people. The underlying dataset, published with Discuss Data, is available here upon request.

Nov. 10, 2023

First dataset from Russian Independent Media Archive online

The cooperation between Discuss Data and the Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA) led to first results: The dataset Protest Graffiti During the Russian Invasion of Ukraine as Covered by Russian Independent Media is now available in open access. The dataset contains 772 articles from 27 media outlets between 24.02.2022-31.08.2023 and offers an addition to Aleksandra Arkhipova's "No wobble" data set about Anonymous Anti-War Street Art In Russia.

Nov. 2, 2023

Discuss Data at BASEES 2024!

Discuss Data will organize a panel at the BASEES Annual Conference 2024, that will take place at the University of Cambridge on 5-7 April 2024. The panel, titled "Research Data Quality in Times of War: New Challenges, Questions, and Solutions" will be chaired by Olga Onuch from Manchester University. Eduard Klein will discuss the potential of Discuss Data as a tool for research data management. The other panelists are Marnie Howlett (University of Oxford), Volodymyr Paniotto (Kyiv International Institute of Sociology), and Michael Rochlitz (University of Oxford).

Sept. 28, 2023

New cooperation with the Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA)

Discuss Data has started a cooperation with the Russian Independent Media Archive (RIMA). RIMA is an initiative dedicated to preserving independent media outlets that are increasingly at risk of censorship or closure. RIMA collects archives from independent media active in Russia since 2000, making them easily accessible to researchers. The collection currently contains more than 2 million articles from 44 sources. Within the scope of the cooperation, selected data sets by RIMA will be made available on Discuss Data.

Aug. 14, 2023

German-Ukrainian Historical Commission Funds Archival Services

The German-Ukrainian Historical Commission (DUHK) offers small grants for archival services for historians who are working on topics of Ukrainian or German-Ukrainian history as part of their Master's thesis, PhD or post-doc. Application deadline is September 15th. Further information about the program and the application process (in German/Ukrainian only) is available on the DUHK website.

July 11, 2023

'Digital Humanities' community space will be presented at FORGE 23

FORGE 23, one of the main conferences on research data in the Digital Humanities (DH), will take place this year on 4-6 October in Tübingen. Daniel Kurzawe from the Discuss Data team at the SUB Göttingen and Thorsten Kahlert from our new project member HAB Wolfenbüttel, who is in charge of setting up the new community space, will use this opportunity to present the concept of the community space for the Digital Humanities. More information about FORGE 23 can be found here.

April 25, 2023

Discuss Data at the "Day of Research Data"

The U Bremen Research Alliance, a cooperation between the University of Bremen and twelve federal and state financed non-university research institutes, organise a "Research Data Day" on 07 June 2023. Several research institutions will offer information on research data management. Discuss Data will be present with an information stand between 01:30 - 4:30 pm at the SOCIUM. The program is available here.

March 7, 2023

Reading Recommendation: Replicating Secondary Qualitative Data

While quantitative research data is increasingly shared and used for secondary research, secondary qualitative data analysis (SQDA) is less common. Florian G. Kern and Katariina Mustasilta discuss the challenges and opportunities related to secondary qualitative data analysis in political science. Their results show, that SQDA "largely depends on how primary researchers share their ‘raw’ qualitative data, that is, interview and focus group transcripts in our example study, as well as the additional documentation to understand primary context". The article "Beyond Replication: Secondary Qualitative Data Analysis in Political Science" was published online first in Comparative Political Studies and is available in open access.

March 1, 2023

Opininion polls during wartime

The latest Russian Analytical Digest No. 292 and the German-language Ukraine-Analysen 278 analyse the problems, challenges and validity of opinion polls in Russia and Ukraine, where the Russian-Ukrainian war has had a significant but different impact on public opinion and polling. Heiko Pleines, Discuss Data's curator of polling data, discusses surveys under war conditions in Ukraine that are available on Discuss Data, as well as the Levada polls on the Discuss Data online platform. There are also other contributions on the topic from established authors and renowned pollsters.

Feb. 27, 2023

Discuss Data is hiring!

Discuss Data is looking for a software developer and a research assistant for community engagement (both part-time, 50%). The detailed job description can be found (German only) on the website of the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen.

Feb. 13, 2023

New Data Set: Interviews with Emigrants Escaping Mobilization in Russia

Ekaterina Vorobeva collected 18 semi-structured interviews with reservists who emigrated from Russia to escape the "partial mobilization". The interviews, accessible upon request, shed a light on the reasons and ways of emigration after the "partial mobilization" was announced in Russia in September 2022.

Feb. 7, 2023

New Article with "Discuss Data"-Dataset Published

The research article "Flexible Authoritarian Governance in Russia: The Politics of Ideas on Family Policy", written by Marina Khmelnitskaya , Ann-Mari Sätre and Ulla Pape was published in Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization. The article is empirically based on the data set "Flexible authoritarian governance in Russia", that was published on Discuss Data by the authors and is available in open access.

Jan. 26, 2023

New Newsletter

We have just sent our new newsletter to our subscribers with the latest news and updates from and about Discuss Data. If you want to read the newsletter, click on this link. If you want to subscribe to receive our quarterly newsletter automatically into your mailbox, click here for subscription.

Dec. 21, 2022

Reading recommendation: How to study Russia in a time of conflict

Jeremy Morris (Aarhus University) published a review piece "Political ethnography and Russian studies in a time of conflict" in Post-Soviet Affairs, in which he discusses the challenges scholars working on Russia face due to the Russian aggression against Ukraine, for example, regarding data collection. He emphasizes on the role of domestic researchers and discusses the "blind spots" in the potential communication between political scientists and other social scientists. A preprint version of the article is available on the personal blog of the author.

Dec. 6, 2022

Reading recommendation: Survey research in Russia in times of war

Bryn Rosenfeld from Cornell University published a new article in Post-Soviet Affairs on "Survey research in Russia: in the shadow of war". Rosenfeld discusses the challenges and uncertainties of survey research in Russia, which grew considerably after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The article addresses the changes in the environment for survey research in Russia and tries to give answers to questions such as "Are Russians less willing today to respond to surveys? Are they less willing to answer sensitive questions? How can we design research to elicit truthful responses and to know whether respondents are answering insincerely about sensitive opinions?"

Nov. 28, 2022

New Opinion Poll Data on Political Mood in Ukraine

Discuss Data supported a representative opinion poll in Ukraine conducted in August 2022 by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation (DIF). The survey provides a comprehensive assessment of the political mood of the population. Selected results have been published by DIF (in Ukrainian). The raw data from the entire survey, including a translation into English, is now also available on DiscussData: https://doi.org/10.48320/90CC86CA-C465-4416-9961-AFEC2250288E.

Nov. 24, 2022

DFG extends Discuss Data funding for 3 more years

We are happy to announce: The German Research Foundation (DFG) extended the funding for Discuss Data for another 3 more years! The platform will not only be further developed, but also new communities - so called "Discuss Data Spaces" - will be added in the future. More updates on the new communities will follow in 2023.

Dec. 10, 2021

New Data Collection on Narratives of the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict published!

As addition to an upcoming article in Problems of Post-Communism Nadiia Koval has published a comprehensive list of academic and analytical sources on the Ukrainian-Russian conflict which she and her colleagues have analyzed. This data collection is the first in our security category and the 60th on the overall platform.

Nov. 26, 2021

Data Preparation Grant 2021

A Discuss Data data preparation grant goes to Stas Gorelik and Ekaterina Paustyan for their data collection on "Clone candidates in Russian and Ukrainian parliamentary elections".

Aug. 3, 2021

Paper about Discuss Data at ICCEES conference on August 5th, 2021

Felix Herrmann will present the paper Discuss Data: Promoting Transparency and Data Quality with an Online Platform for Archiving, Sharing and Discussing Research Data with a Focus on the Post-Soviet Region on the ICCEES conference in a panel about Research Data on Authoritarian Regimes and Armed Conflicts in the Post-Soviet Region: Challenges and Solutions. Get more information on the ICCEES conference page.

Aug. 3, 2021

Discuss Data at the FORGE 2021

Daniel Kurzawe and Felix Herrmann will present Discuss Data at the (German-language) FORGE conference about research data in the humanties at September 10, 2021. See the details on the FORGE conference page.

June 16, 2021

Reading recommendation: post-publication peer review

The article "The use of confidentiality and anonymity protections as a cover for fraudulent fieldwork data" discusses the problem of research integrity: The need to grant anonymity and confidentiality to interviewees - especially in qualitative research on sensitive topics - may be abused by researchers. Post-publication peer review (PPPR) is a method to reveal malpractices, as Michael Dougherty shows in this paper, analysing a (meanwhile retracted) article with fabricated interview data.

June 8, 2021

New data set on labour protests in Russia

Petr Bizyukov's data set on labour protests in Russia is regarded as one of the most complete & impressive databases on labour protests in Russia. It covers the period from 2008-2019 and contains reports from federal and regional media, trade unions and other organizations. The data is coded in an SPSS-format and available upon request.

May 12, 2021

New data set on state-business relations in Russia

A new data set on "Socio-Economic Cooperation Agreements and State-Business Relations in Russia’s Regions" was published by Ulla Pape and her colleagues from the Freie Universität Berlin. It contains more than 100 contracts between large companies like Gazprom and Lukoil and the regional administration of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug (KhMAO) between 2010 and 2019 and provides valuable insights about the patterns of state-business relations in Russia.

May 4, 2021

New Data Set with the Russian President's Transcripts online

A fresh data set on Russia is online: The media project dekoder published the raw data from the tremendous "The president's words" special, an analysis tool with 10,000+ transcripts from Putin and Medvedev during their presidencies 2000-2020. Now the data set "The President’s Words: A Term Frequency Analysis of Putin’s and Medvedev’s Statements in Official Kremlin Transcripts" is available in open access on Discuss Data, including a frequency analysis of all terms.

April 30, 2021

The 2020 Belarusian Protest - A "Telegram Revolution"?

During the 2020 protest wave in Belarus against the regime of Alexander Lukashenka, messengers like Telegram played a crucial role. Vasil Navumau from the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) and his colleagues published a data set with a corpus of nearly 2.000 images that shows how the popular Nexta Telegram channel covered and sustained the protest wave.

April 21, 2021

Discuss Data Panel on data-related issues at ICCEES 2021

Discuss Data will be present at the ICCEES 2021 World Congress, that will take place online from 3.-8. August 2021. Our panel "Research Data on Authoritarian Regimes and Armed Conflicts in the Post-Soviet Region" will be chaired by Gwendolyn Sasse (Humboldt University Berlin / Centre for East European and International Studies). The four panelists Vera Rogova (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt), Jan Matti Dollbaum (University of Bremen), Huseyn Aliev (University of Glasgow) and Felix Hermann (Discuss Data) will discuss the challenges and solutions for working with research data on the post-Soviet region.

April 14, 2021

New article by Discuss Data team member

Dr. Andreas Heinrich from the CRC 1342 on "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" together with Dr. Eduard Klein from the Discuss Data team published their open access article "Challenges for the management of qualitative and quantitative data: The example of social policy–related data collections" in Global Social Policy (online first). They discuss such problems as data quality, interpretation and transparency, and describe, why Discuss Data is a useful research data management tool for social welfare data.

April 5, 2021

Reading Recommendation

As corruption is a hidden phenomenon, measuring corruption is a challenge. In his article "Measuring Corruption: A Critical Analysis of the Existing Datasets and Their Suitability for Diachronic Transnational Research" José-Miguel Bello y Villarino discusses the pitfalls of measuring corruption across countries and across time, taking into account especially reliability, validity, and limitations of the widely used Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) and the Control of Corruption (CoC) indicator.

March 3, 2021

Reading recommendation

Data availability and quality in authoritarian regimes is a well known challenge for researchers. In recent years, open government data provided new opportunities for data-driven research. Based on a case study on Tanzania, however, Ruth D. Carlitz and Rachael McLellan show in their article "Open Data from Authoritarian Regimes: New Opportunities, New Challenges" that open data can be biased. The authors provide a helpful framework to anticipate and detect data manipulation in authoritarian contexts, that might be useful for studying post-Soviet countries as well.

Feb. 11, 2021

Newsletter subscription

You are interested in Discuss Data and want to stay up to date with what is happening on the platform? You want to be the first to know which new datasets have been published and which exciting discussions are taking place? Then sign up to receive our newsletter.

Jan. 26, 2021

Reading recommendation: New article on data transparency

Hundreds of political scientists of the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD) platform extensively discussed the benefits, costs, ethical challenges, practicalities, and limits of research data transparency. Now, their findings were published in the article “The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations: Insights and Implications” in the journal Perspectives on Politics. Apart from the paper, QTD also published a supplementary set of working group reports with practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research.

Dec. 7, 2020

New Dataset on Protests in Ukraine published

The Public Sociology Lab (PS Lab) published their insightful "Participation in Euromaidan and Antimaidan movements, Ukraine, 2014" dataset on Discuss Data. It contains 148 interviews conducted between June - August 2014 in Ukraine on the topic of Maidan/Anti-Maidan. The interviewees describe, how they became involved in Maidan / Anti-Maidan, what they did there, and how their life has changed afterwards. For more information and access to the data, contact Svetlana Erpyleva.

Nov. 12, 2020

New Data Collection on Corruption in Higher Education published!

Dr. Elena Denisova Schmidt (University St. Gallen, Switzerland) published a Data Collection Voices of Students: Attitudes towards Corruption in Khabarovsk. It contains quantitative and qualitative data from several major universities in Khabarovsk (Russia). The data suggests, that advanced students are more likely to act dishonestly than freshmen – indicating that Russian universities promote informal practices and corruption as social norms.

Nov. 9, 2020

New article published by the Discuss Data team

Felix Hermann and Daniel Kurzawe present the general idea and the strengths of Discuss Data in their article "Discuss Data - a community-centred approach for research data management in the humanities and social sciences", published in the open access publication Bausteine Forschungsdatenmanagement (in German).

Sept. 21, 2020

Reading recommendation

The Russian independent media outlet "Project" published an article by sociologist Olga Molyarenko (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), where she discusses why in Russia statistical official data increasingly diverges from reality - and what can be done about that (in Russian). The article is based on an extensive qualitative study by Molyarenko about the generation of official statistics in Russia, available here (in Russian).

July 29, 2020

Reading reccomendation

In his article "Houston, We Have a Problem: Enhancing Academic Freedom and Transparency in Publishing Through Post-Publication Debate", Kristian Skrede Gleditsch addresses the current debate on controversial articles and makes a plea for transparency and post-publication discussion, instead of simply retracting controversial articles.

July 23, 2020

Productive beta test started!

Currently, Discuss Data is at the stage of productive beta testing. If errors occur during your usage of the platform, please contact eklein[@]uni-bremen.de and write a short description of what happened.

The official launch of the final website is scheduled for September.

July 21, 2020

Call for data

Discuss Data announces its first call for data! For further information, please read the "Call for data" - and feel free to share our call with your colleagues and within your networks and institutions!

June 16, 2020

Discuss Data Newsletter

If you want to be regularly updated about the latest Discuss Data news, please send an email to eklein@uni-bremen.de. There will soon be be an automatic subscription process.

May 12, 2020

Conference report published

The German H/SOZ/KULT-website has published a detailed report about the Discuss Data workshop "Digital Methods and Research Data Management in the Humanities and Social Sciences", which took place in October 2019 in Moscow. The English version of the report is available here.

April 30, 2020

Reading recommendation

The article Opinion under Occupation by the Ukrainian Weekly discusses the reliability of public opinion surveys in the regions of the Donbas not controlled by the Ukrainian government. Catching up on this topic, a dispute has emerged in Foreign policy, whether public opinion data from annexed Crimea is reliable, as John O'Loughlin et al. are arguing, or not, as Dmytro Kuleba counters, citicizing fundamental problems with measuring popular opinion under occupation.

April 1, 2020

Article authored by the Discuss Data team published in Journal of Eurasian Studies

The article Transparency and quality assessment of research data in post-Soviet area studies: The potential of an interactive online platform by Andreas Heinrich, Felix Herrmann and Heiko Pleines describes the reasoning behind the Discuss Data project.

March 18, 2020

Reading recommendation

Research on authoritarian and repressive regimes poses distinctive challenges regarding research transparency and ethics. Bellin et al. (2019) discuss in their article "Research in Authoritarian and Repressive Contexts" what has to be considered when conducting research in such contexts - a must-read for researchers working on the post-Soviet region.

March 1, 2020

Discuss Data will be available soon!

Currently, we are in the final phase before official launch of the Discuss Data project.

Oct. 1, 2019

Programme for Discuss Data workshop online

The programme for the Discuss Data workshop on "Digital Methods and Research Data Management in the Humanities and Social Sciences", organized by the Research Centre for East European Studies (FSO), the State and University Library Göttingen, the Higher School of Economic Moscow (HSE) and the German Historical Institute Moscow (DHI), held at the DHI in Moscow on October 7-8th 2019, is now available online.