Presentation at the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres (ACHRC), July 2013. Panel description: The Digital Humanities offers not only new tools to support what we do in the Humanities, but also new ways of thinking about what it is that we do. This panel will build upon Alan Liu’s keynote discussion of ideas for digital tools for humanities advocacy and speak to the way non-digital centres can benefit from digital humanities initiatives.

1. CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
BUILDING
RESEARCH
ENVIRONMENTS
The 2013 ACHRC Annual Meeting
Deb Verhoeven @bestqualitycrab

2. CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
+
$
-
+ BENEFIT -
HuNI
Research My World (pozible)

3. the HuNI Project – a virtual laboratory for the
humanities
Humanities Network Infrastructure
http://huni.net.au/

4. • One of the Virtual Laboratories funded by the
National eResearch Collaboration Tools and
Resources (NeCTAR) project
• Integrating humanities data at a national level
• Deploying a Virtual Laboratory (or vLab) for
researchers to search for (discover), and work with
(analyse), the large-scale aggregations of HuNI data.
about HuNI

5. a partnership
… a Deakin led consortium
• Cultural data providers (10) – project co-operators
• Humanities software developer (1) – project co-
developers
• eResearch organisations (2) – lead development
agencies

6. HuNI partner datasets
AMHD
MAP
CAARP
Bonza
AFIRC
Circus Oz
AusStage
Media: film, cinema, theatre, newspapers, magazines,
advertising, music, live performances
DAAO
AustLit
AWR
ADB
DoS
Biographical: artists, designers, writers, significant
people, scientists, Sydney demographics
EOAS
AUSTLANG
Mura
Indigenous languages

7. AustLit

8. ADB

9. DAAO

10. AUSTLANG

11. bonza

12. AusStage

13. EOAS

14. TUGG

15. Welcome to the Cinema and Audiences Research Project (CAARP) database: An online encyclopaedia of
cinema-going in Australia.
Data
This site contains information on film screenings and venues in Australia.
311,137 screenings
10,256 films
1,978 cinemas
1,649 companies
From 1846 to now

16. • NeCTAR investment of $1.329M
• Partner contributions of $480,000
• Partner in-kind contributions amounting to >$1M
a fiscal collaboration

17. a project
• project director/ community liaison lead (20%)
• project manager (100%)
• technical coordinator (100%)
• information services coordinator (90%)
• community liaison (20%)
• communication coordinator (20%)
• administrative support (20%)
• software developer(s)
The HuNI project began in June 2012 and runs until December
2013 (possibly June 2014).

18. overall data architecture
Data harvest,
transform
and ingest
Data update
and
publish ADB DAAO CAARP AFIRC AusStage
Solr Search Server
[HuNI Data]
RDF Triple Store
[HuNI Linked Data]
Data
analysis
and
mapping
HuNI Ontology
HuNI Virtual Laboratory
Scholarly researcher workflow tasks
Registration and login
Profile management
History recording
Project management
Admin tasks
Public web interface
Public and citizen
researcher workflow tasks
Data
discovery
Data
analysis
Data
sharing
Simple search
Advanced search
Save search results as
private collection
Refine / expand
collection
Analyse and annotate
collection
Export collection
Share collection and
analysis
Simple search
Advanced search
Share search results
Deep (SPARQL-based)
search
Corbicula
Data
integration
HuNI
side
Partner
side

20. Virtual Laboratory Researcher Workflow – Discovery (part 1)

21. Virtual Laboratory Researcher Workflow – Discovery (part 2)

22. Virtual Laboratory Researcher Workflow – Discovery (part 3)

23. Virtual Laboratory Researcher Workflow – Analysis (part 1)

24. Virtual Laboratory Researcher Workflow – Analysis (part 2)

25. Virtual Laboratory Researcher Workflow – Sharing

26. HuNI project website – huni.net.au

27. HuNI project wiki – apidictor.huni.net.au

28. • Ensure that Australian cultural datasets and the research associated with
them become part of the emerging international Linked Open Data
environment.
• Enable research enquiries to move easily from: what is? to where is?
• Support the role of annotation and metadata in discovery of new
knowledge or the means to elucidate new knowledge
• Position the idea of data as both a subject and object of analysis in
humanities
• Contribute to debates around standards for development and
implementation
Broad Benefits

29. • Enable humanities researchers to work with cultural datasets more
efficiently and effectively, and on a larger scale than is presently possible;
• Encourage the systematic sharing of research data between humanities
researchers (including the cultural dataset curators themselves), the
community and cultural institutions;
• Encourage a higher level of cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary
research, both within the humanities/creative arts and between the
humanities/creative arts and other disciplines, and the wider public;
• Support innovative methodologies such as network analysis, game theory
and ‘virtual history’ that rely on large-scale datasets
Specific Benefits

30. 1. Organisational level: the goals and processes of the institutions involved
2. The semantic level: meaning of the exchanged digital resources
3. Technical level: implementing data interoperability requires both data
integration and data exchange processes as well as enabling effective use
of the data that becomes available
Pasquale Pagano, ‘Data Interoperability’ (GRDI2020)
4. Project level: The advent of more complex ‘big humanities’ projects
requires multiple and multi-disciplinary personnel which in turn entails
the organization of different workflows and expectations: e.g. challenge of
developing a comprehensive or consortial approach, common definition
of project method and so on.
Challenges - interoperability

31. pozible.com/ResearchMyWorld
CROWDFUNDING UNIVERSITY RESEARCH
...because it takes a village to fund the answers

32. CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Research My World
Deb Verhoeven, ACHRC, July 2013
„Research My World‟
launched in April 2013:
• eight projects
• spanning a range of
discipline areas and
project types
• Aiming for $5,000-$20,000
• One admin assistant at 0.2

33. CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Research My World
Deb Verhoeven, ACHRC, July 2013
Pilot completed June 2013:
• six successful
• $50,000 of new research
funding
• more than 200 media
stories
• more than 3,600 specific
tweets (incl. Stephen Fry
to 5.5m followers)

34. CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Research My World
Deb Verhoeven, ACHRC, July 2013

35. CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Broad benefits
Deb Verhoeven, ACHRC, July 2013
• Disintermediation of research funding
• Reduction of “compliance burden” for
researchers (and universities)
• Digital “presence building” for the
researchers and their work including
capacity building in digital
culture/skills for the researchers

36. CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Specific benefits
Deb Verhoeven, ACHRC, July 2013
• Provide a unique opportunity to promote research
in terms of its meaning to communities and not
just other academics („to bring research home‟).
Successful funding campaigns relied on clear
communication of projects and social and
traditional media engagement.
• Shift the way universities promote research in an
increasingly networked environment
• Provide an additional funding stream for
researchers, particularly those at the start of their
career

37. CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Specific benefits
Deb Verhoeven, ACHRC, July 2013
• Focus effort on communicating with the
public rather than labour-intensive, highly
competitive, blind reviewed funding
applications with diminishing success rates
• Provide „discipline-neutral‟ opportunity; both
science and humanities-creative arts were
able to generate funds if community relevance
was demonstrated

38. CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Challenges
Deb Verhoeven, ACHRC, July 2013
• the „digital capacity‟ of individual academics
• the „digital capacity‟ of academic institutions
• expectations arising from the difference
between existing campaigns for crowdfunding
and those specific to a projects with „research‟
focus
• the public‟s response to projects from
different research disciplines