Sustainable data from digital research: Humanities perspectives on digital scholarship

Dates: 12-14th December 2011

Venue: University of Melbourne, Australia

A PARADISEC conference

In 2006 we ran the interdisciplinary conference Sustainable Data from Digital Fieldwork: From creation to archive and back, and published papers and podcasts of presentations in an Open Access repository. Five years on, we want to address the field of digital humanities scholarship, again from the perspective of methods for improving research outcomes by better use of technology.

Digital methods for recording information are now ubiquitous. In fieldwork-based disciplines, like linguistics, musicology, anthropology and so on, recordings are typically of high cultural value and there is great benefit in the proper curation of these recordings, to the researcher, to the community in which they worked, and to the broader society.

What are the costs and benefits of these technologies?

Highlights

Keynote Speaker: Susan Schreibman, from Trinity College in Dublin, who is co-editor of A Companion to Digital Humanities and has been the Director of the Digital Humanities Observatory, a national digital humanities centre developed under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy.

This conference will run a week after the Australian Linguistic Society Conference in Canberra and immediately before a workshop offered by the RCLT at LaTrobe University on Urban Fieldwork.

Click here to see a list of presentations.

The Australasian Association for Digital Humanities

The newly formed 'Australasian Association for Digital Humanities' will also hold a meeting at the conference.

Conference details

We will not be arranging accommodation.

There will be no registration fee (due to restrictions on the use of the venue), but morning and afternoon tea vouchers will be on sale as will the volume 'Sustainable data from digital research'.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Papers are welcomed on any relevant topic, including (but not limited to):

How can we:

• ensure the longevity of the data we record
• access our own data over time
• provide public access to publicly funded research data (including dealing with ethical and IP issues)
• provide data to the people we record, especially to those who have little access to computers or the internet
• ensure that our research processes and analysis take maximum advantage of the access to data provided by digital methods
• embed our analysis in accessible data to allow verification of our claims
• enable research based on digital data from archival sources
• develop tools and processes that accumulate data in standards-conformant formats

Full papers will appear in a peer-reviewed volume available as a book at the conference and will be hosted in an open-access online repository at Sydney University.

Supported by Linguistics & Applied Linguistics at the University of Melbourne

The organising committee is: Nick Thieberger, Linda Barwick, Craig Bellamy, Rosey Billington, Steven Bird, Birgit Hellwig, Tom Honeyman, Anthony Jukes, Stephen Morey, Rachel Nordlinger, Jane Simpson.

Contact Jill Vaughan for further information.