With 20 institutions using Figshare as a data repository in South Africa (16 currently live, 4 more launching their repository soon), a thriving community of institutions in this region are using Figshare to showcase a range of research outputs from data on cultural heritage sites to digital archives.
A case study that explores the Zamani Project collection, which consists of born-digital file sets of unprocessed and processed data collected on-site at cultural heritage sites across the world. To date, Rüther and his team, Roshan Bhurtha, Ralph Schröder, Bruce McDonald and previously Stephen Wessels, Christoph Held and Rudi Nesser, have documented some 250 monuments across 65 sites in 18 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Data collected includes scans, GPS and photographs. These data exist as raw, unprocessed file sets, as well as pro-cessed 3D models, point clouds, panorama tours, GIS layers and virtual worlds.
Dr Susan Miller, a Post-Doc Fellow at the Fitzpatrick Institute of Ornithology at the University of Cape Town, recently deposited a very interesting dataset in ZivaHub, UCT’s institutional Figshare repository. It contains microsatellite data and genetic data from a population of lions at the Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park in Kwazulu Natal. The data was deposited as supplementary material for a paper published in Conservation Genetic on the ‘Genetic rescue of an isolated African lion population.’
Figshare Ambassadors are advocates for open research and open data. They are active in community events and conversations around these topics while benefitting from a network of other ambassadors in their region.
