ABSTRACT
The so-called Open Science Movement has gained considerable importance in recent years. To make science more open, accessible, and transparent, several infrastructures, tools, and practices have been developed. Open Science infrastructures not only enable digitally mediated forms of exchange and collaboration between scientists, research partners, and the general publics but also provide novel opportunities for data sharing.
In ethnographic research, however, data sharing is still uncommon, and researchers are often unable or unwilling to share their data. So far, much research around data sharing in qualitative research has focused on the ethical challenges, legal issues and infrastructural needs associated with data sharing. Far too little attention has been paid to the discomfort with sharing different types of data. In our contribution we thus deal with the role that emotions and affects play in engagements with data and the sharing of data. It is based on a series of semi-structured focus-group interviews with researchers, mainly but not exclusively from social anthropology and reveals researchers’ attitudes towards Open Science and public data sharing. We nuance the argument that the growing demand for Open Science continues to expose a series of affective resonances and dissonances. Data sharing, in our view, always takes place within specific affective arrangements (Slaby, 2019) involving researchers, research participants, methods, data and digital infrastructures. An affect-inspired approach further allows us to draw attention to the contested and affective character of public formations within social sciences.
