A national digital repository will now capture the process, practice, and final creative outputs of practice researchers—including films, exhibitions, and artefacts—alongside traditional text. This matters because current open research infrastructure and reward systems overwhelmingly favour written publications, leaving creative practice researchers without a way to formally deposit, cite, or gain recognition for non-text outputs. The scoping projects (PR Voices and SPARKLE) revealed that this gap silences diverse voices and undervalues expertise expressed through film, performance, or design. Enact directly addresses that by implementing a dedicated metadata schema, persistent identifiers (DOIs and ORCIDs), and the CRediT taxonomy within a core repository built on open-source technology. If successful, Enact will become the first national service where practice researchers routinely capture both the narrative and the end product of their work. This could shift how universities, funders, and publishers evaluate research contributions—moving beyond a text-only metric. It will also feed into global open standards communities, improving how practice research is represented in systems like Dublin Core and RIOXX. The project is primarily infrastructure-building rather than curiosity-driven fundamental science, but its success would quietly reshape the infrastructure that determines whose expertise counts and how it is shared.
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Enact Practice Research Data Service: PR Voices and SPARKLE Phase 2 is a national practice research data service, building on insights from the Practice Research Voices (PR Voices AH/W007622/1) and Sustaining Practice Assets for Research, Knowledge, Learning and Education (SPARKLE, AH/W007606/1) scoping projects carried out in 2022 and funded by AHRC's Scoping Future Data Services call. It is led by an expert team with global connections, and underpinned by their proven co-designed community approach. The Enact Practice Research Data Service will: 1. Build a core national practice research repository, to capture the process, practice, and end product 'data' created by practice researchers. This repository, and the associated website, will provide both a 'shop window' digital space for practice research and a forum for the practice research intersectional community of practice. With a focus on creative practice research, it will further enable practice research across disciplines to be captured in the future. 2. Implement the PR Voices metadata schema (developed by the scoping projects), 'as-is' metadata standards: Dublin Core and RIOXX, and persistent identifiers: DataCite DOIs and ORCID identifiers, as well as the CRediT taxonomy, within the core repository. This will enhance existing collaborations with global open standards communities to improve representation of practice research within these open standards. 3. Make practice research data more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable (FAIR). 4. Facilitate a programme of community advocacy and engagement, links to existing resources, regular news and blog posts, and highlighting of events. 5. Deliver targeted training sessions and compile practice research training resources. 6. Be scalable, and plan for sustainability, implementing existing open source repository technology and open technical standards. 7. Have governance underpinned by open infrastructure principles, including representatives from key stakeholders, groups and organisations, to embed trust across the communities with a stake in this work. Enact will become the first place that practice researchers capture process and narrative, as well as the end product of their creative research. Enabling recognition of expertise from a more diverse range of voices from contributors alongside their preferred formats of knowledge output (including film, exhibitions, artefacts, etc) will inform open research policy development and support changes to global research reward and recognition systems that are currently focussed primarily on traditional text-based outputs. The Enact team will bring expertise and global connections and actively contribute to the infrastructure for digital arts and humanities (iDAH) community.
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