eLabour

New Contours of Production and Work. Interdisciplinary Center for IT-based Qualitative Sociological Research on Work (eLabour)

The BMBF-funded project eLabour conducts qualitative research in the field of social sciences. For this purpose, already collected study data from various social science research institutions are evaluated under new research questions. Since this involves research data from over 40 years, it is available in a wide variety of media: as documents in paper form, as audio interviews, and in numerous digital written formats. In the eLabour project, a central digital platform is now being set up to capture and enable simplified access to this research data in digitized form. This platform is intended - while guaranteeing data protection - to enable collaborative work with the research documents in a virtual research infrastructur

Project Goals

The eLabour project aims to build a virtual research environment for re-using existing social science data for qualitative research. In the focus are study data from the last 40 years with the focus on production and working contours since the end of “Fordism”. For this, the rich data treasures of the participating institutes will serve as a base for cross-sectional qualitative analysis using digital tools. The effort includes empirical studies from more than 40 years and has the goal on developing industrial sociological research with IT-based methods. In interdisciplinary working groups the project members develop and test an appropriate research infrastructure and from IT-based methods for secondary analysis of qualitative data.

GWDG’s Role in the project

The GWDG is responsible for the development of the research data platform and its subsequent operation. In this context, a comprehensive rights and role model was implemented. The research data platform thus allows sociological research data to be exchanged at different release levels in a privacy-compliant manner. In addition to developing the main platform, the GWDG has also implemented an original data archive that allows researchers to securely store non-curated research.

Project Partners

• Sociological Research Institute Göttingen e.V. (SOFI Göttingen)
• Data Service Center for Business and Organizational Data at Bielefeld University (DSZ-BO)
• Research Center L3S, Leibniz University of Hanover
• Institute for Sociology Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena
• Institute for Social Science Research Munich e.V. (ISF Munich)
• Lower Saxony State and University Library Göttingen (SUB)
• Social Research Center Dortmund, ZWE of the TU Dortmund University (sfs Dortmund)