30 What is Data Documentation?
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Data documentation is the practice of recording how your data was collected, processed, and organized. It describes your data.
Examples include:
- Codebooks that detail variables
- Readme (e.g., plain text) files that explain your research project and its file and folder structure
- Explanations of how you name your files
- Any other types of documentation you create to describe your data
Data documentation is a way to put the FAIR principles into practice (see Module 1: Introduction to RDM for more information on FAIR principles). Part of what makes data FAIR is that the data are documented and have adequate metadata (i.e., that the data is described). When data are made available to others, good documentation and metadata make that data easier to find, access, process, or combine with other data, and use.
