Soils to Stories: Embedding field insights in research data stewardship

Research does not begin in boardrooms or libraries. It often starts in the field with community voices, scribbled notes, snapshots, videos and voice recordings. It lives in the cautious responses during interviews, the laughter when someone explains something better than a form ever could, and in the local wisdom whispered across generations. The very genesis of data that would grow into knowledge.

Recently, while accompanying an ECREA project team on a field visit to Homa Bay County, a rural heartland of Kenya, which was no ordinary field visit, but an immersion into the lived realities of the very communities whose data often ends up locked behind institutional firewalls and scholarly abstracts.