by Steve Kolowich
Dedoose, a cloud-based application for managing research data, suffered a “devastating” technical failure last week that caused academics across the country to lose large amounts of research work, some of which may be gone for good.
SocioCultural Research Consultants, the company that sells Dedoose, is still scrambling to recover as much of its customers’ work as possible, and has said in a blog post that “the vast majority” of research data on its platform were not affected.
The crash nonetheless has dealt frustrating setbacks to a number of researchers, highlighting the risks of entrusting data to third-party stewards.
Margaret Frye, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, is one of them. Ms. Frye, a sociologist, was using Dedoose to sort and annotate journal entries about AIDS and sexual attraction in southern Africa. But when she logged in on Tuesday evening, she was greeted by a message saying the system was down.
At first, Ms. Frye did not panic. “It wasn’t at all clear that there were data lost,” she said. But when Dedoose finally did come back online, about 60 of the annotated texts were missing.
Ms. Frye and a fellow researcher still had the source material saved on their computers, but more than 100 hours’ worth of “coding”—marking up the journals with metatags and marginalia—had been lost. Ms. Frye is not holding her breath about whether they will be salvaged.
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