Tag Archives: Australia

Digital Humanities Research Infrastructures in Australia

Digital Humanities, infrastructure, respositories, , , ,

Thanks to Curtin’s Faculty of Humanities and Computational Institute I attended the Australian Academy of Humanities 2 day Humanities Arts and Culture Data Summit, 14-15 March, hosted by the AHA https://www.humanities.org.au/ at the National Film and Sound Archive (NSFA), Canberra.

The below is from a brief report but may be of interest to those who’d like a quick guide to what is happening regards digital humanities research infrastructures at a National level in Australia.

SUMMARY:

Quick guide to social sciences/sciences platforms and RIs

  • Dr John La Salle, Director, Atlas of Living Australia https://www.ala.org.au/ biodiversity data
  • Dr Merran Smith, Chief Executive, Population Health Research Network http://www.phrn.org.au/
  • Andrew Gilbert, General Manager, Bioplatforms http://www.bioplatforms.com/andrew-gilbert/
  • Professor Bert Roberts, Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, 1 year into Centre of Excellence https://epicaustralia.org.au/  “Now is the time to tell a culturally inclusive, globally significant human and environmental history of Australia. We like to call it, Australia’s Epic Story. The ARC Centre of Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH) will undertake research that will safeguard our national heritage, transform research culture, connect with communities and inform policy.”

Humanities

  • Professor Linda Barwick FAHA, University of Sydney – PARADISEC http://www.paradisec.org.au/ has funding issues but well respected, may require more computing to scale. “PARADISEC (the Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) is a digital archive of records of some of the many small cultures and languages of the world”
  • Professor Julian Meyrick, Flinders University – AusStage http://www.flinders.edu.au/ehl/firth/focus/digitalhumanitiesanderesearch/ausstage.cfm “AusStage provides an accessible online resource for researching live performance in Australia. Development is led by a consortium of universities, government agencies, industry organisations and collecting institutions with funding from the Australian Research Council and other sources.”
  • Professor Mark Finnane FASSA FAHA, Griffith University – Prosecution Project https://prosecutionproject.griffith.edu.au/ “The criminal trial is the core of the Australian criminal justice system. It is the product of police investigation and its outcomes include the sentences of imprisonment that populate our prisons.” It is an impressive historical database. Overseas law researchers and historians (UK etc.) use it because it is better than theirs, apparently.
  • Alexis Tindall, Research Engagement Specialist – Humanities and Social Sciences Data Enhanced Virtual Lab (HASS DEVL https://www.ersa.edu.au/1-1-million-funding-humanities-arts-social-sciences-data-enhanced-virtual-lab/ “Humanities, Arts and Social Science researchers will get access to cutting-edge online tools and services thanks to $1.1 million in new funds for a collaborative virtual laboratory project. The Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) Data Enhanced Virtual Lab (DEVL) will bring together fragmented data, tools and services into a shared workspace.”

Others included (but there were more)

  • Adam Bell https://aiatsis.gov.au/ (very good talk on problems funding and running archives), Canberra. “The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) is a world-renowned research, collections and publishing organisation. We promote knowledge and understanding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, traditions, languages and stories, past and present.”
  • Roxanne Missingham, University Librarian, Australian National University, showed the library books destroyed by flood, said to applause that infrastructure included people.
  • Alison Dellit, Assistant Director-General, National Collections Access, National Library of Australia. Discussed the National Library’s Trove https://trove.nla.gov.au/ “Find and get over 569,383,366 Australian and online resources: books, images, historic newspapers, maps, music, archives and more”)
  • Professor Rachel Fensham, Chief Investigator Social and Cultural Informatics Platform, University of Melbourne https://scip.unimelb.edu.au/about “SCIP responds to current demand and future growth in the digital humanities, arts, and social sciences by providing the necessary informatics skills and technology platforms to support researchers, research students and strategic research activities.”

AAH-HAC-Data-Summit-Program(2).pdf

AAH-HAC-Data-Summit-Discussion-Paper.pdf

Some thoughts on the 2016 National Research Infrastructure Roadmap of Australia

Academic, Digital Humanities, respositories, , ,

The publically available documents are at

I enjoyed reading this, thought it had promise over the ealier research priorities, but I have five suggestions:

1. Missing Details About Heritage and Cultural Heritage In General

However heritage is only mentioned once, 8.3.2 and it requires major investment in infrastructure, especially research data storage, linked to the CADASTRE problems Australia is experiencing and that I am sure CRCSi would have told you about. Not only was heritage only mentioned once there was no mention of heritage collections yet Australia has 19 world heritage sites (http://www.australia.com/en/articles/world-heritage-sites-australia.html) not to mention the many state heritage sites and heritage towns. Digital collections are described but in terms of ecology, there are also cultural digital collections and cultural heritage collections, infrastructure between libraries archives galleries and museums that should have shared features, formats and efficient, scalable infrastructure.

2. Missing Infrastructure Theme: Tourism

Tourism is another big missing item. Smart tourism is a great industry to have but requires investment and infrastructure.

3. Encouraging co-curation and management and data replication

Also, although communities are mentioned, they could play a vital role vis a vis crowdsourcing, i.e. researchers and government departments need to develop better methods to disseminate data to communities, the skills and techniques to understand that data, and the capabilities to help curate, manage and develop that data. The roadmap still feels very much like data is stored and preserved and transmitted only by experts but Australia won’t have the money to pay these experts effectively and comprehensively.

Ways to allow partial editorial access at institutional and community level is vital for public engagement, feedback and budget efficiency.

4. More Emphasis On Education

Education is Australia’s 3rd or 4th biggest export industry, surely there should be more planning on how to educate and base education around the use and challenges of these major research infrastructures and how to measure their impact? Education is mentioned four times, but only, as far as I can see, in terms of access to infrastructure.

5. Academic Publication

The ways in which academics can publish and how they are measured is changing rapidly. Infrastructure could be more dynamically and effectively tied into publication and dissemination systems. Traditional proprietary journals published static research data and deny or delay access, digital publication means they could be produced more efficiently and quickly, be reformattable/reconfigurable for a variety of platforms and purposes and they could also be linked dynamically to updateable research data.

11.3 is the only place to mention publication and all it asks for is a “transformed environment where data and tools are provided reliably to researchers, and then the outputs of research – the publications, data and methods – are available in an integrated, reproducible form.”

Publish or Perish?

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In Australia the Prime Minister has recently criticized academic publications,  they aren’t value for money as they don’t directly lead to commercial outcomes, patents etc.

Prime Minister Turnbull wants to end the “publish or perish” culture in which academics are pressured to focus on constant publishing rather than producing work with commercial and community benefit.

Does that mean the government will support open access journals or reduce academic funding? Or transfer that money to STEM and business partnerships?

Under Dr Finkel’s proposal, the amount of revenue generated from industry and other users of research would be used to help determine how university research is funded.

I am afraid it will be the latter. While I am a supporter of closer relationships between universities and business – something our Australian Research Council grant system does not adequately address – there is always a need for non-commercial research.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull last week told a public forum: “Everyone I talk to thinks that the problem is that academics have got – their incentives are very much associated with publish or perish.”

And if the Prime Minister ever bothered to ask me, I would reply support OPEN ACCESS publications, which are currently not recognized by your Excellence in Research for Australia system!

The problem is more:

  • The reduction of funding to universities even though 20 of our universities are in the top 400 in the world.
  • The Australian government’s lack of funding support for innovation and exchange with the EU’s Horizon 2020!
  • The government reducing funding cuts for research centres and universities (and the government funding to science research hits a 30 year low).
  • The government and university focus on large and time consuming grant applications rather than effective grant applications that are evaluated to ensure they do what they promise and not just say they are new.
  • Grants should be given to people on merit rather than on previous grant success!
  • The government’s determination of national science and research objectives as reliance on pipeline science and technology when
    1. Science is more than just applied manufacturing; it requires critical thinking and fundamental research (not always directly and immediately applied to commercial returns).
    2. International education is Australia’s fourth largest export market.
    3. The Australian coterie of lawyer trained politicians owes its members’ education and subsequent careers to Plato and Aristotle i.e. humanities…
    4. The lack of suitable funding for Australian research infrastructure cripples everyone, scientists and humanities scholars.
    5. Lack of funding into community-based research puts you behind Europe and New Zealand and won’t prepare us for social problems such as potential conflict in the future.

Dramatically and instantly removing funding for publication only further destabilizes the higher education system, creates ruptures between academics here and overseas, and will not encourage academics to come to Australia.

That said, a strategic and thoughtful investigation into research funding and dissemination of results would be most welcome.

OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHERS

Speaking of Open Access here are some of the open access publication schemes NOT recognized by the Excellence in Research for Australia framework:

  1. http://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-digital-humanist/
  2. http://openhumanitiespress.org/plastic-bodies.html
  3. http://www.matteringpress.org/news/first-four-books-will-be
  4. http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/367/vertical-readings-in-dantes-comedy/54e1823d42b1f797e97bb800dda4b22c

 

Thanks to the Open Humanities twitter feed.

The Tyranny of Distance Panel at DHA2014, Perth Australia 2014

Digital Humanities, visualisation, , , , , , , , , ,

Digital Humanities And The Tyranny of Distance for http://dha2014.org/ Wednesday 19 March, 2014, Hosted at University of Western Australia, Perth Australia

Slides

Talk 1 (virtual): No Panacea: How Can Virtual Research Environments Enhance Distance Research-Matt

After a recent report on virtual research environments (VREs) from the Joint Information Systems Council in the UK (JISC) found that, even after 6 years of funding and study by JISC, “the ‘emergent community of practice’ has failed to grow significantly beyond the pool of practitioners in direct receipt of JISC project funds,”[1] perhaps it is time to step back and consider whether VREs truly can be a useful addition to humanities research and, if so, under what circumstances.  This paper will discuss the areas in which scholars should expect VREs to assist them in distance research (access to the same tools, data, and workflows in a single environment) and the price they will need to pay for these advantages (either significant time and energy to develop their own environment or being satisfied with a pre-existing solution).  This paper will conclude that VREs can be an excellent tool for distance research, but one for which a significant price must be paid given the current state of existing VRE platforms.

Talk 2 (virtual): Collaborative writing in a distributed research consortium: requirements and possible solutions-Christof

This contribution reports on experiences made with collaborative writing in the DARIAH consortium (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, www.dariah.eu). DARIAH is a distributed research project involving numerous partners from 12 different European countries and in which tools supporting various collaborative writing and project coordination tasks have been used over a considerable period of time. Despite the fact that collaboration across geographical distance is essential for this and many other projects, the existence of conflicting requirements of scholarly collaborative writing processes make a generic solution very hard to come by. Among these requirements are real-time collaborative writing, flexible word-level commenting, footnote support, version control, access rights management, publishing options and open-source availability of the tool itself. Currently available technical solutions do not meet all of these requirements. Tools discussed in this contribution include Etherpad, Mediawiki/Confluence, GoogleDrive, Dropbox and WordPress. Finally, one promising solution will be discussed which is still in early stages of development, namely Penflip (www.penflip.com), a GitHub front-end for text composition.

Talk 3 (virtual): Recognizing Distance: On Multilingualism in Digital Infrastructures-Toma

Infrastructures are installations and services that function as “mediating interfaces” or “structures ‘in between’ that allow things, people and signs to travel across space by means of more or less standardized paths and protocols for conversion or translation.” [2] By definition, infrastructures are in the business of overcoming distance: they have always been seen as motors of change propelling society into a better and brighter future. Which is why it would be all too tempting — and all too easy — to approach the question of digital research infrastructures uncritically by embracing the master narratives of efficiency and progress without discussing the larger and more complex implications of institutionalizing networked research. A digital infrastructure is not only a tool that needs to be built: it is also a tool that needs to be understood. In this talk, I will address the challenge of multilingualism in research infrastructures evolving against the backdrop of global capitalism in its electronic mode, the so-called “eEmpire” [3] How can we make sure that digital infrastructures — not only the ones we are trying to build now, for ours are baby steps, but the future ones, the ones we hope to see built one day — do not turn from being power grids into grids of (hegemonic, monolingual, monocultural) power?

Talk 4 (in person): The 3D world is your stage-Erik

How can scholars collaborate in virtual environments in a manner similar to video-conferencing? Which conferencing and distributed modeling tools are particularly appropriate to research and collaboration in the spatial and artefactual humanities? This talk will briefly outline needs, issues and promising services and working prototypes.

Authors

Matthew Munson <mmunson@gcdh.de>

Matthew Munson is a researcher at the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities (GCDH) in Göttingen, Germany.  He holds a bachelor’s degree in Education from the University of Kansas and in Theology from Loyola College (now Loyola University) in Baltimore, Maryland, and a master’s degree in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia.  While a student at the University of Virginia, Matthew began working in the digital humanities center there, the Scholars’ Lab, and immediately became interested in the fascinating insights digital methods could give into ancient religious texts.  He received a Scholars’ Lab Digital Humanities Fellowship in 2009-2010 to explore the use of text-mining strategies to identify relationships between the Greek texts of St. Paul in the New Testament and the Hebrew texts of the Old Testament.  At the GCDH, Matthew works in the European project DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) and coordinates the DARIAH work package concerning VREs on the German and European level and is also coordinating the development of the DARIAH international digital humanities summer school, planned for August 2014 in Göttingen.  His current research interests lie in the area of semantic drift and methods of calculating the change in the meanings of words from the Old Testament to the New Testament.

Christof Schöch <christof.schoech@uni-wuerzburg.de>

Christof Schöch is a researcher at the Chair for Digital Philology, University of Würzburg, Germany, working in the DARIAH-DE (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) project. He obtained his PhD from Kassel University & Paris-Sorbonne in 2008 with a study published as La Description double dans le roman des Lumières 1760-1800. His interests in research and teaching are French Literature (Enlightenment, contemporary novel, classical drama) as well as digital humanities (scholarly digital editions, quantitative text analysis, digital infrastructure).

Toma Tasovac <ttasovac@humanistika.org>

Toma Tasovac is the director of the Belgrade Centre for Digital Humanities. He has degrees in Slavic Language and Literatures from Harvard and Comparative Literature from Princeton. He works on complex architectures in electronic lexicography, digital editions, and integration of digital libraries and language resources. He is equally active in the field of new media education, regularly teaching seminars and workshops in Germany, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Erik Champion <nzerik@gmail.com>

A Professor of Cultural Visualisation at Curtin University, Erik was previously Project Leader of DIGHUMLAB Denmark, and co-Leader of the Research and Public Engagement part of DARIAH. His research is primarily in virtual heritage, serious games, and 3D applications in the Digital Humanities. He has postgraduate degrees in Architecture, Philosophy, and Engineering (Geomatics). He has written Playing With the Past, edited Game Mods: Design Theory and Criticism (a free download at ETC Press), and is writing Critical Gaming in the Digital Humanities.

[1] Miller, Paul, “JISC VRE Programme: Impact Study,” March 2010:http://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/JISC_UK/J100315M.pdf, p. 21.

[2] Badenoch, Alexander and Andreas Fickers (2010), ‘Europe Materializing? Toward a Transnational History of European Infrastructures’, in Badenoch, Alexander and Andreas Fickers (eds.), Materializing Europe: Transnational Infrastructures and the Project of Europe (Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 11.

[3] Raley, R. (2004). eEmpires. Cultural Critique 57, 132.

personal bit of information and apology

Conference, Digital Humanities, , , , ,

I am sorry I have not had much time to update the site lately, I have been very busy with organizing a workshop in Copenhagen
http://dighumlab.dk/news/single-news/artikel/cfp-cultural-heritage-creative-tools-and-archives-workshop/

The programme will appear soon and I am very happy with it, I think it will be a great event.

However June will probably not see much activity on this site as I will be tidying up loose ends here in Denmark before moving to Curtin University in Western Australia in July to start a new role. I am sorry in many ways to be leaving Europe but this is probably the right time to do so and some wonderful opportunities await.

In particular I am looking forward to working with iVEC, supervising PhD students, facilitating a new masters in visualisation for Curtin, and also help them develop new facilities such as this one for research into Cultural Visualisation (amongst other things).

Centernet Professor in Digital Humanities, UWS (Australia) vacancy

Digital Humanities, job, , , , ,

The School of Humanities and Communication Arts brings together scholars with interdisciplinary research interests in the following fields:
advertising, anthropology, Asian studies, cultural studies, graphic design, history, international relations, journalism, linguistics and modern languages, literature and literary studies, media and visual studies, media production, music recording and performance, music therapy, philosophy, photography, political and social theory, religious studies, and web design.

Their research intersects with the focal areas of a range of University Research Institutes and Centres: The Institute for Culture and Society, The MARCS Institute, The Religion and Society Research Centre, and the Writing and Society Research Centre. In the area of Digital Humanities, the School will be working in very close collaboration with the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics and with the eResearch team. In addition to researchers from the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, the Digital Humanities Research Group is expected to incorporate researchers from the technology disciplines, primarily, from the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics and to develop close links with the UWS eResearch Team.

Applications are invited for the continuing position of Professor (Academic Level E) from scholars with outstanding teaching and research strengths in Digital Humanities. The position will be responsible for providing academic leadership and for developing research and teaching programs in the Digital Humanities. As the Professor in Digital Humanities, you will be responsible for leading and developing the new Digital Humanities Research Group (DHRG). You will have a PhD and a demonstrable record of excellent teaching and high quality international publications in the area of Digital Humanities, and success in obtaining competitive research funding and delivery on the projects. You will bring with you management and leadership skills, and experience in generating and managing large collaborative and interdisciplinary projects. You will be responsible for the DHRG’s intra- and inter-institutional relations, and for the development of both a strategic and 3-year operational plan for the Research Group

The School operates in a multi-campus environment and the successful applicant is expected to teach on all campuses on which the School operates in face-to-face teaching delivery and/or through blended learning technologies. This position will be located at the Parramatta campus.

Remuneration Package:Academic Level E AUD$189,215 p.a (comprising salary AUD$160,629, 17% Superannuation and Leave Loading)
Position Enquiries: Professor Peter Hutchings, (61 2) 9772 6167; p.hutchings@uws.edu.au Closing Date: 13 March 2013
How to apply: Please visit the UWS website http://careers.uws.edu.au/Current-Vacancies for full details on this position and how to apply.

current and future issues in science education

design, ,

This is a pithy article on science education in Australia and beyond.

http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/new-critic/ten/venville

Disciplinary versus Integrated Curriculum

The impending Australian national school curriculum leads to important questions about what knowledge should and shouldn’t be included in a curriculum and how the included knowledge should be arranged. Dominant modes of curriculum in the twenty first century suggest there is established, canonical knowledge that is included in school curricula within disciplines such as physics, mathematics, history and literature, and that the disciplines themselves almost always provide the structure of the school day (Scott, 2008)1. This is widely referred to as a disciplinary, or traditional, approach to curriculum. Current, education-based debates, however, question the assumption that there is a corpus of disciplinary received wisdom that is beyond criticism (Kelly, Luke, & Green, 2008)2. Disciplinary knowledge is translated in curriculum documents throughout the world into key criteria, standards, or educational outcomes that are narrowly focused on what is readily measurable, or amenable to standardized achievement testing. As more and more attention in schools turns to the issue of preparing students for high-stakes tests, there is a real risk of reducing the opportunities for students to engage in more contextual, issue-based and applied learning that does not fit within the boundaries of the traditional disciplines. The problem is acute in science where there is considerable evidence that students are disengaged with the way it is currently taught in Australia and other western countries.