posted on 2020-03-10, 03:55authored byAlexis Tindall, Ian Duncan
The Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) community covers an extraordinary
breadth of research activities. In this Birds of a Feather (BoF) session, we explore Australian
developments to support the communities under this wide umbrella. These communities
can be divergent in approaches and objectives, but remain united in data and united in
approaches to research support.
The Australian Government is poised to make a long-awaited investment to support the
humanities, arts and social sciences community under the National Collaborative Research
Infrastructure project. In preparation for this investment, they have commissioned the
Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) to map the data landscape relevant to the HASS
community, relevant concurrent initiatives, and the role of existing research infrastructure
in supporting those communities. While the data and research support landscape for HASS
is rich, fragmented and diverse, the real challenge is in capturing the landscape of research
communities and responding to their needs.
But what about the research communities? Under the umbrella of ‘HASS’ we cluster
research as diverse as Urban Environments and Design, with Law, Classics and the
Philosophy of Religion. How do we plan for a research infrastructure investment that can
support such breadth of activity, diversity of approaches to data and sources, differing
research ambitions? A HASS Research Data Commons has been identified as a model that
could aid data-enabled HASS research. A Commons can be planned with flexibility and
interoperability, to allow focussed support to benefit specific research communities in initial
implementation, that can be extended to support related activities across new and
emerging communities.
This 60 minute BoF seeks to share approaches to supporting HASS research communities,
and learn from related regional initiatives. The BoF will open with a presentation on the
Australian HASS data and data-enabled research landscape as captured in this project, and a
sketch of our proposed responses. Discussion after the presentation will focus on challenges
and opportunities in this area.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Alexis Tindall is a Senior Research Data Specialist at the Australian Research Data Commons,
with a particular interest in supporting and enabling humanities, arts and social sciences
research. She has extensive project management experience in diverse environments.
Before joining the eResearch community, she worked in natural history and social history
museums, and is passionate about digitisation and improving digital access to the nation’s
treasured collections.
Ian Duncan is Director, eResearch Infrastructure & Services, at the Australian Research Data
Commons and has many years experience in defining, developing, and running
infrastructure to support high-impact research. Ian was previously Director of the NCRIS
Research Data Storage project and has a keen interest in working with evolving communities
in making more data more available to more people and looking at how to effectively
incorporate citizen science, industry and government partners into our sector.