IARC releases “Swamped?”, a data management survival guide for scientific researchers

In a new series of videos, the Learning and Capacity-Building Branch of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) presents an entertaining introduction to data management. The videos star FAIR Frog and Data Gator, scientists from two very different institutions: FAIR Labs and the Swamp Institute.

Their adventures, captured in the “Swamped?” series of five short videos, follow the characters as they search for missing samples, scour memory sticks and shared drives to find raw data, try – and fail – to merge databases, and even build a time machine.

The “Swamped?” series provides information and tips that all researchers will find useful. The videos feature interviews with researchers from partner institutions of the Human Exposome Assessment Platform (HEAP) project. Among the tips the experts provide are how to keep track of data through global unique identifiers (GUIDs), how to design metadata at the start of a research project, and how to use standardized case report forms and unique researcher identifiers. The full video series is hosted on the HEAP YouTube channel.

IARC led the development of the series as part of the Education and Dissemination Work Package of HEAP, in collaboration with consortium partners from several European countries. The main objective of the HEAP project is to develop an informatics platform for analysing exposome data. The project is one of nine European Union-funded Horizon 2020 projects in the European Human Exposome Network (EHEN).

Visit the HEAP website 

Watch the video