Building Victorian Digital Humanities

Context

Global demand for digital research is exponentially increasing. As part of this growth, the HASS fields have become actively engaged in digital research and curation.

Motivation

Despite this however, Humanities brings out a particular set of challenges. For example, in fields such as architecture, dance and heritage, data is often non-numerical and unstructured, yet produced in vast quantities.

These challenges include both social and technical challenges. Social challenges include connecting researchers to each other and related service providers.  Technical challenges include cleaning, wrangling, and curation of aggregated large non-numerical datasets for research purposes.

The aim of this discussion is to initiate a dialogue across the Federation for the Advancement of Victorian eResearch (FAVeR)1  to determine better ways to engage with humanities researchers with a view to increase the understanding and support that we can provide to them. 

This will complement the work the ARDC is doing around the exploration the establishment of a Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) Research Data Commons2 at the request of the Department of Education and in conjunction with the Australian Academy of the Humanities. 

Our ultimate aim is to collaborate to bridge the divide between the oft disparate areas of humanities and digital research.

You can read more about the project via this document as well as the digital HASS project page.

To attend the meeting, email or call Richard Huysmans.