Australian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres (ACHRC)

Things are moving on the Digital Humanities front. This just came across my desk.

Begin forwarded message:
From: Stuart Cunningham
Date: 11 August 2011 2:42:39 PM AEST
To: Undisclosed recipients:;
Subject: INVITATION: Australian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres (ACHRC) membership

Dear CCI members

The Australian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres (ACHRC) is inviting membership from university-based Humanities research centres, collecting institutions (such as art galleries, libraries, and museums) and cultural organisations (such as creative industries and festivals of the arts). The ACHRC aims to foster connections between a wide range of members, and to encourage research support, community-based initiatives, internal and external fellowship programs, and the development and maintenance of research collections.

I encourage you to consider membership. For further information on ACHRC membership, please visit http://achrc.net/members.

Kind regards
Stuart Cunningham

Distinguished Professor Stuart Cunningham
Director ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation
Queensland University of Technology | Z1 – 515 Musk Avenue | Kelvin Grove QLD 4059
T: +617 3138 3743 | F: +617 3138 3723 | M: 0407 195 304 | Skype: SC260453
E: s.cunningham@qut.edu.au
W: http://cci.edu.au
View my Profile: http://cci.edu.au/profile/stuart-cunningham
View my publications: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Cunningham,_Stuart.html

CRICOS No: 00213J

When my worlds collide

I love it when my worlds collide.

Three days a week, I work for the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability. Here in the Australian office at RMIT, we work on issues related to Australian security (broadly understood). In particular, we keep track of what Australia’s forces are doing overseas, in the belief that an informed public can have a better debate.

This involves keeping track of what Australian forces are doing in East Timor. On the weekend, my boss sent me a link to an item in the Timor Archives blog, National Archives digitised records: A better view.

It is a lovely little note about Tim Sherratt’s RecordSearch Image Tool userscript for Firefox.

Good to see that little tool making life useful for people. And great to see my disparate worlds collide.

Research Australia and Trove

People Australia started out as a project to create an accurate, canonical listing of all the published authors in Australia. It is part of the smarts behind the National Library of Australia’s advanced search, Trove. It is fantastic! Now it is starting to morph into something bigger, where every researcher in Australia will be listed on it.

People Australia started as a way to provide information about people in Australia (in a similar way that Picture Australia provides access to pictures by, of or about Australia). At its core is the Name Authority File, which tries to provide clear information about all Australian authors, so that librarians can catalog books.

Besides the Name Authority File, People Australia pulls in data from several other encyclopedic resources:

Australia Dancing

Biographical information about Australian dancers, artistic directors, etc.

Australian Dictionary of Biography Online

Over 10,000 scholarly biographies of dead people who were significant in Australian history.

Australian Mines Atlas

I have no idea why this is in there.* It contains authoritative information about mining and minerals in Australia.

Australian Women’s Register

Biographical data about Australian women and their organisations.

Collections Australia Network

Public gateway to museums and art galleries across Australia including the small to medium regional institutions.

Dictionary of Australian Artists Online

Almost 8,000 biographies of Australian artists.

Libraries Australia

The home of the the Australian National Bibliographic Database (ANBD), which records the location details of over 42 million items held in most Australian academic, research, national, state, public and special libraries, and which depends upon the Name Authority File, as mentioned above.

Music Australia

Almost 5,000 detailed biographies of Australian musicians, performers, composers, groups and ensembles, festivals and organisations.

* Actually, I do know why the Mines Atlas and Collections Australia are in there. It is because they hold canonical information about organisations, and organisations are collections of people for a common purpose.

Those playing along at home may have noticed that we aren’t talking about many people yet. Trove can provide information about 880,000 people (give or take a few) over the whole of recorded history in Australia.

But I think that it is going to get much bigger than that.

One of the big collections missing from People Australia is Australian Research Online. Australian Research Online provides access to 400,000 Australian research outputs, including theses; preprints; postprints; journal articles; book chapters; music recordings and pictures. Basil Dewhurst is now working on the Australian Research Data Commons Party Infrastructure Project, which is aiming to adapt the People Australia infrastructure to enable authority control for research outputs and for data.

It is a logical extension to add this data to People Australia. The Name Authority File lists people who have written and published books. Australian Research Online lists people who have written and published scholarly articles.

While the data probably gets a little bit dirtier with each data collection that is added, it also gets much more comprehensive. And the tools for disambiguating, merging and splitting entries get better as they are run across different collections.

It might take a little while, because Australian Research Online currently doesn’t disambiguate very well (which is why they are doing it, I guess). And it doesn’t have much historical information. In fact, most of the people in Australian Research Online are alive, which will probably change the balance of People Australia a bit in that regard.

And that is where I’m starting to get an itchy feeling up my spine.
If they are amalgamated, every published academic in Australia will be listed in People Australia.

Lots of little bits of information published in a wide variety of places are pretty harmless. An aggregated collection of published information in one place is a much more powerful beast. That is, after all, why we use it.

From a privacy point of view, it is important to remember that all of the information in People Australia is published information. Nothing private is included.

So, technically, there is no privacy issue here because all the data is already published. However, it would be good to try to embed the national privacy principles (public sector and private sector) in the ethos of the collection. And I’m pretty sure that they are, as far as that is practical.

This may not happen. There may be very sound policy reasons for not amalgamating them. But People Australia, at its heart, is an aggregator and the drive around the world is to aggregate where possible.

After that, what else might go into People Australia?

From an institutional point of view, almost any authoritative collection of published information could be added to People Australia. Those collections will come from any group of people who have set up an archive or museum, codified their information and put it on-line in an ordered way. So, for example, I can easily imagine a “Cricket Australia”, since cricket is famous for collecting biographical statistics about players. But just about any museum or archive will fit: “Racing Australia”, “Film Australia”, “Jewish Australia”, “Chinese Australia”, “Politicians Australia”, etc.

The big leap will come when commercial organisations understand the value of this sort of rigor. I would love to see “Journalists Australia”, for a start. And then I would like to see those journalists link the people in their stories back to People Australia, where relevant. That way, their newspaper articles could be harvested and collected with some degree of accuracy.

Aside from that, I’ve talked previously about how German biographies on Wikipedia are being cross-linked to Deutsche Bibliothek’s Personennamendatei (PND). I think that is a great thing, and would like to see it replicated here.

In that same post, I mentioned how people like Tim Sherratt are starting to build ways to access the data if you are not an institution. Wragge’s Identity Browser is designed for finding just one name and the link that will point to it. This is handy if you are writing a blog post about someone, for example, and want to link to them. Tim has described how it all works in I link therefore I am.

Linking to Trove

At ANZDEG 2009, I got pretty excited about cross-linking to People Australia and Trove. Since then, I met Tim Skerratt and he put me on to Wragge’s Identity Browser (see below for details).

Recently, I tried to convince a friend at an art gallery that cross-linking their collection to Trove would be worthwhile.  Here is what I wrote.

I think that cross-linking is pretty exciting because it helps people to place artists in context. Take, for example, Grace Cossington Smith.  She is listed in a couple of different places:

• Smith, Grace Cossington (1892 – 1984) in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
• Grace Cossington Smith in the Dictionary of Australian Artists Online.
• Smith, Grace Cossington (1892 – 1984) in the Australian Women’s Register.

These three entries are linked together at Trove’s entry for Smith, Grace Cossington (1892-1984).

Each organisation has a different criteria for listing Grace on their Web site.  The National Gallery of Victoria, for example, has her pictures.  The Australian Dictionary of Biography considers her a significant dead Australian.  The Australian Women’s Register considers her a significant Australian women and the Dictionary of Australian Artists Online includes her as an Australian artist.

Each entry is written to a different brief and has a slightly different point of view. Because the articles were written at different times and under different institutional policies, they link to different resources.

• The Australian Dictionary of Biography entry provides a Google search for her.
• The Dictionary of Australian Artists Online provides links to Picture Australia and Google image searches for her.
• The Australian Womens’ Register provides links to her entries at Trove and the Australian Dictionary of Biography, as well as some other related resources.
• Trove pulls them all together and adds in all the National Library of Australia resources.

If you are interested in how it might work, have a quick word with Basil Dewhurst at the National Library of Australia.  He is the People Australia wizard and People Australia is the authoritative name file that powers Trove. Talk to him about cross-linking whole sets of data, maintaining integrity over time, etc.

Sometimes, though, you just want to link one or two names to Trove.  Maybe you want to disambiguate someone in a blog post.  In that case, think about using Wragge’s Identity Browser. Tim Sherratt has written Wragge’s Identity Browser as a Python library that helps you to quickly generate an RDFa link to someone in Trove. That means that you can link to a person in Trove and (with the help of a Friend of a Friend (FOAF) prefix mapping) tell harvesters that this is a link to a person and that person is Grace Cossington Smith.  All that semantic goodness. Tim has described how it all works in I link therefore I am.

With tools like this, I can imagine a day soon when Australian biographies listed in Wikipedia are cross-linked to Trove, just like German biographies are cross-linked to Deutsche Bibliothek’s Personennamendatei (PND).

Thoughts after 2009

Things I care about at ANZDEG (by Helen Morgan)

Thanks to everyone who attended ANZDEG 2009.  I had a great time and I hope everyone else did, too. Photos are available on Flickr (thanks, Helen) and tweets on Twitter (for as long as they last).

I loved that we could look at the Dictionary of Sydney online and I loved that the Australian Women’s Register is cross-linking to the People Australia entries in Trove.

I tried a couple of organizational experiments this year.  Some worked, others didn’t.  Here are my notes on what I thought did and didn’t work, in case they might be useful in the future.

Going it alone

I don’t actually have a big enough network to organize ANZDEG.  There are two parts to the organization: making it happen on the day and making it happen beforehand. Making it happen on the day is relatively straightforward, once you have a venue.  One person can do it and if you have more then you can do more. But making it happen beforehand is about talking to people, networking with them, and working out who wants to come and what they want to do when they get there.  I realized after the event that I don’t really have the network for that. Lesson learned.

No program

I took a leaf out of the Unconference book and didn’t have a program. That made the organisation much easier but it turned out to be a mistake.  If you are coming from New Zealand or Sydney any your boss is funding the trip, you really want to be able to show them a program of speakers.  Being able to say, “Oh, there will be some good dictionary and encyclopedia people there” just doesn’t cut it. Even though it is a pain to organise people beforehand, I think that it is an important courtesy to people who are coming from overseas or interstate.  I suspect that most people are probably thinking, “Well, duh…” about now, but I can be a slow learner.

Organising who said what on the day worked OK and I would do that again, but just not for the whole program.  People wrote their issues and presentations on yellow stickies and stuck them on the wall.  Then we all ticked the ones that we wanted to hear / see / discuss. It made things a bit more fluid, and allowed new topics to bubble up on the second day.  I’d do it again like that, but maybe just for a session or two.

Technology vs. content

There is always a tension between talking about the content and talking about the technology. I had at least two people who were not keen to come because they thought that there would be too much technology. So, on the first day, I said that we needed to be mindful of not straying too far in either direction.  When the acronyms started to get to thick, I issued a ‘tech’ warning. It seemed to work.

No money worries

One of the best things that I did was make the event free.  I don’t think that it made much difference to the participants, but it made the organization much much easier. I didn’t have to deal with RMIT finance department, I didn’t have to issue reciepts or refunds and I didn’t have to try to reconcile anything at the end. Much easier.

Of course, this only works if you have access to a free venue and have somewhere handy where people can get good coffee in the morning, lunch at lunchtime and a drink at the end of the day.

Welcome, Dictionary of Sydney

I’ve just been wandering through the Dictionary of Sydney, having a wonderful time.  I particularly liked Shirley Fitzgerald’s take on the Garden Palace.  I recommend you start there and wander to your heart’s content.

Policies for on-line cultural collections (part-time job, Melbourne)

The people that I work with at RMIT Business have a part time position going at the moment. I’m hoping that you, or someone in your network, might be interested in taking it up. It would be good for someone who with research skills who cares about knowledge and knows a bit about the Web.

It is a part time position for 4 days per week from 1 February – 31 October 2010. It pays $31.98 per hour.

The project is looking at the policies behind digitizing objects and putting them on line. Up until now, a lot of museums have worked with material that was out of copyright, the creator was dead and gone, and there are no ongoing relationships to worry about. In that situation, the policies are pretty clear.

When you are a museum or gallery that wants to do the right thing, preserve and develop your relationships with the creator community and build something that will last, it gets tricker. Objects from the recent past are part of a living culture. They deserve respect. That means that you need to get the policy right first.

So we are looking for someone who can:
+ work with the Pacific communities in Melbourne.
+ build a clear picture of their approaches to traditional knowledge and intellectual property.
+ work with us to codify that picture.

We need someone with:
+ an understanding of ethnographic research.
+ the ability to listen really, really well.
+ at least a Bachelor with Honours degree, at least.
+ the ability to communicate and write well.
+ Australian citizenship or permanent resident status.

The range of disciplines that might be relevant is quite wide. Anthropology or Sociology would be ideal, but I can also see space for Pacific Studies, Media Studies, Museum Studies, Art History, Art Conservation, Curatorship, Creative Media, Multimedia Studies, Animation or Interactive Design, depending on your background and experience.

If you have done previous inter-disciplinary team research, that would be great. If you have publications in related fields, that would be great, too.

You would be working with a good group. Our recent projects have looked at a range of things: online banking and remittances, off-shore privacy agreements, why people buy stuff online (or don’t), new intermediaries, Web accessibility in Australia, and mortgage fraud. A bunch of stuff, united by two themes: where is the user and what is the law? Answering these questions often helps us understand what is actually going on in an online situation.

If you are interested, please send an letter expressing your interest and a CV to Professor Supriya Singh by 16th November 2009. Please e-mail:
supriya.singh@rmit.edu.au

Here is the official information:
=================================
Expression of Interest: Digital Cultural Collections: Copyright and Traditional Knowledge

The Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre at RMIT University is seeking Expressions of Interest for a Researcher to work four days (28.8hours) a week. This research project involves developing medium and long-term relationships with the Pacific communities in Melbourne to understand their approaches to traditional knowledge and intellectual property as cultural collections go digital. Ethnographic research methods will include participation observation. Interested persons should at least have a Bachelor with Honours in Anthropology, Sociology, Pacific Studies or Media Studies. We would highly value previous inter-disciplinary team research and publications in related fields. The researcher would be able to write well and undertake literature reviews and other research related activities.

The project will run from 1st February 2010 to 31st October 2010. This research role is a casual position at $31.98 per hour. The researcher will be located at the School of Accounting and Law.

Expressions of interest and CVs should be sent to Professor Supriya Singh by 16th November 2009. Please e-mail:
supriya.singh@rmit.edu.au

The Unconference idea

I’m looking at making this year’s meeting a little be less formally structured than most years.  There is no formal program, for example.

What I would like to do is this:

1. At the start of each day, have everyone with a talk briefly describe what they want to talk about.
2. Have people indicate their interest in the different talks.
3. Run the talks that most people are interested in.

In this, I am tipping my hat to the Unconference idea and their earlier counterpart, Open Space Technology.  Unconferences are semi-structured and participant driven.  They recognize that there is a large body of knowledge sitting in the audience, as well as standing on the stage. When I heard about the idea, I thought that it suited the small, friendly group that we have, so I thought that I might try it out.

There are some disadvantages to this.  It is a bit hard to go to your boss and say “I’d like to go to this great ANZDEG 2009 thing” when you can’t point to a list of speakers or topics.  But mostly, if you have been before, you know the sorts of topics that will come up.  If you haven’t been before, let me know and I will ring your boss and convince her how good it will be.

Each year we try to balance technical discussion with non-technical discussion.  We’ve done this in different ways – break out groups, different streams, different days.  I’m hoping that this less structured format will be another way to strike a balance.

And, of course, I’m trying to reduce the work involved in organizing ANZDEG. The easier it is to organise, the more likely it is that people will volunteer to organise next year (I hope).

Circus OZ video archive at ANZDEG 2009

I’m very pleased to announce that my colleague, Jane Mullett, will be attending ANZDEG 2009 and presenting on an exciting new project.  She is working with Circus Oz to move all of their video archive online.

Circus Oz has 30 years of performance and archival footage, documenting their whole history of performance.  The idea is to ‘chunk’ it into the individual acts, tag each act and make it available to circus artists, fans, audiences and the general Web-going public.  The idea is that people will be able to review particular acts, compare different performances and, ideally, build their own circus for a bit of fun.

Making this archive available is particularly important, as there is no written language for circus performance (like there is for dance, for example).  So video is the language that they use.

Jane knows her stuff. She has performed with Circus Oz, been a manager with the Flying Fruit Fly Circus, was instrumental in setting up the National Institute of Circus Arts (NICA) and has recently finished a PhD, Circus Alternatives: the Rise of New Circus in Australia, the United States, Canada and France.

Please make her welcome at the workshop and provide her with some feedback on her project.

ANZDEC 2009

The programme outline for ANZDEC 2009 is now available!

ANZDEC 2009 will happen on Thursday 26 and Friday 27 November 2009 at RMIT Design Research Institute, Melbourne.

Feel free to register if you’d like to be there, and to suggest topics on the registration form.

Hope to see a lot of the ANDEG community there.