Comparative Research Network:

Our Voices Resource Data Bank

People’s stories can add rich qualitative data to projects and provide research teams and organisations with unique insight.

These stories can be used to identify key themes, inform findings and conclusions, and positively impact on policy, service design and local agendas for social change. Digital Community Reporting is a powerful tool for collecting these stories from citizens but there is no coherent mechanism for making these digitally-generated stories, which provide valuable accounts of their lived experience, accessible to decision- and policy-makers. The project intends to develop a pan-europeon curator training programme to bring these stories together to provide insight to these groups .

The innovative training curriculum and framework for these curators will add value to the data, and the resource database will provide support to mobilise the data and present it through open-access digital platforms. These curators will be able to evaluate the stories emerging from their digital-story telling communities, and present these stories as meaningful data in a media format.