Open Access Explained

Network Analysis

Lada Adamic is teaching a course on "Social Network Analysis" through the School of Information at teh Universityof Michigan.
The course is run through "Coursera" and its free to sign up, look at tlectures and participate.

• The course uses Gephi and some of its tutorials. 
• To explore networks interactively, you can visit the NetLogo demonstrations. The Easley and Kleinberg free text on Networks, Crowds and Markets is an excellent source. The chapters pertinent to this class are 1-5, 13-14,19-21.

Class Notes are available here.

eResources Update

There are a number of subjects and courses out there on the Digital Humanities, including at the ANU Digital Humanities Hub.
Here is another one: "This year-long course examines the relationships among academic history, digital media, and community formation"

Tim Sherratt is the author of Query Pic and other Digital Tools. Here are the slides of a talk he gave at the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Arts eResearch Forum:

"Basically I was arguing that as well as making stuff, digital humanities can involve a lot of stretching, twisting, pushing and breaking stuff. The web is not fixed or static, there are many points at which we can intervene and change the way information is presented. What we need is confidence to pull things apart, and the ability to critically examine why things work the way they do (or don’t). And imagine alternatives."

Here is a call for papers for the annual international conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, which includes the Association for Computers in the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, the Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs, and centerNet.

Here is a link to the keynote talk Bethany Nowviski gave last month, at the second annual conference of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities. I her Bio, Bethany is Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library, Associate Director of the Scholarly Communication Institute, and President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH). She has  recently directed two projects funded by the NEH, IMLS, and Library of Congress: the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship and Neatline: Facilitating Geospatial and Temporal Interpretation of Archival Collections.

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media have Digital History Research Awards for students entering the History and Art History doctoral program. The deadline for applications is January 15, 2013.

Here is a link for the 2012 National Library of Australia Forum. It includes talks by:

• Marie-Louise Ayres, Assistant Director-General, Resource Sharing, National Library of Australia
• Debbie Campbell, Director of Collaborative Services, National Library of Australia
• Merrilee Proffitt, Senior Program Office, OCLC Research
• Judy Stokker, Director, Library Services, Queensland University of Technology
• Laurel Paton and Ms Joanna Meakins, Libraries Australia Search Project, National Library of Australia
• Rob Walls, Director of Database Services, National Library of Australia
• Bill Macnaught, National Librarian, National Library of New Zealand 

Here and here are a couple of posts on the difficultiues of finding work in the field of Digital Humanities.

Here are some sources on eGovernment in Victoira. Here is the Blog for the Federal Government 2.0 Taskforce. Here is the site for the upcoming Gov 2.0 Conference: Delivering a More Open, Transparent and Consultative Form of Government.

The ARC is interested in opportunities in crowdfunding for cultural and creative projects.

The Australian Society of Archivists and the Recordkeeping Roundtable are hosting an upcoming workshop on "Reinventing Archival Methods".

The National Archives of Australia has a series of Research Guides.

Finally- here is one link on the e-publishing revolution.

eResearch Events

 There are some upcoming eResearch events around the place.

The Eidos Institute in partnership with National and State Libraries Australasia is hosting: "Where is the evidence?  Policy, research and the rise of grey literature".

National Library of Australia, National Library of Australia, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory

Wednesday October 10

9-5.

Recent advances in information and communication technologies are disrupting traditional publishing models, radically changing our capacity to reproduce, distribute, control and publish information. This is particularly so in the case of policy research which is often produced outside formal commercial publishing channels as 'grey literature'. The kind of research publications listed on Australian Policy Online.

Grey literature provides both opportunities and challenges  but there is no doubt that it continues to grow in volume, importance and complexity. This National Conference will explore these opportunities for increased access to knowledge and research communication as well as the challenges presented in producing, disseminating, evaluating, collecting and accessing policy grey literature.

The conference is part of an ARC Linkage research project: http://greylitstrategies.info/ Follow the conference at: #GreyLit on Twitter.

Some of the Presentations fro "Grey Literature" are available here.

 Dipping a Toe into the Digital Humanities and Creative Arts
 Date: Friday October 19, 2012
Time: 9.30am - 4.30pm
Location: Deakin University Melbourne City Centre, Level 3, 550 Bourke St, Melbourne, 3000
Digital Humanities describes research, teaching and knowledge realisation at the intersection of computing and the humanities, social sciences, creative and performing arts. It is broadly interdisciplinary and encompasses a wide variety of emerging practices, ranging from curating digital research collections, developing new tools for exploring archives to visualising information from large data sets.

28 October - 2 November.

eResearch Australasia focuses on new information centric research capabilities, and how information and communication technologies help researchers to collaborate, collect, manage, share, process, analyse, store, find, understand and re-use information.

There are also some great workshops at the conference.

66 Goulburn Street  Sydney NSW 2000

What is Digital Humanities?

A symposium to explore what it measn to do digitla humanities

When: 1 & 2 November 2012 – 9.00 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Where: Room 219 in the Sir Llew Edwards Building
Cost: Free (supported by the Faculty of Arts Strategic Initiatives Fund)

 

The Australian Academy of the Humanities 43rd Annual Symposium - Challenging (the) Humanities 

Thursday 15 November 2012 - Friday 16 November 2012 

UWS, Parramatta, New South Wales

The humanities are currently presented with a rare combination of intellectual challenges such as changing policy environments; the financial crisis; new technologies and infrastructures; and the environmental challenges presented by the conception of the anthropocene. The Symposium will debate these challenges and the responses that these have elicited, including the increasingly prominent role of Indigenous perspectives.

National Digital Forum 2012 Conference

20-21st November

Wellington

 Reinventing Archival Methods

When: 9:30am – 4:00pm, 29 and 30 November 2012

Where: ATP Innovations, Australian Technology Park, Redfern, NSW

Cost: $300 ASA/RIMPA/ALIA members, $375 non-members (Lunches, morning and afternoon teas will be provided)

The digital deluge is upon us: On 13 July 2012, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that globally, the amount of data created, collected, and shared in 2009 was 800,000 petabytes. By 2020 this figure will be 35 zettabytes (one zettabyte is equivalent to 260,000,000,000 DVDs).

 Sydney

4-6 December, 2012

The theme for the 2012 conference is “Materialities: Economies, Empiricism, and Things”. The organisers are calling for proposals of papers and panels on this theme and reflecting contemporary research in the field of Cultural Studies. Keynote speakers: Jennifer Biddle (UNSW), Brenda Croft (UniSA), Ross Chambers (Michigan), Katherine Gibson (UWS), Ros Gill (University of London), Gay Hawkins (UQ), Lesley Head (Wollongong), Bev Skeggs (Goldsmiths, London). Other plenary speakers will include: Ien Ang (UWS), Tony Bennett (UWS), Stuart Cunningham (QUT), John Frow (Melbourne), John Hartley (Curtin/Cardiff), Meaghan Morris (Sydney), Stephen Muecke (UNSW), Tom O’Regan (UQ), and Graeme Turner (UQ).

InASA: Border Breach: Australia and the Global Circulation of Ideas

Melbourne:

5-7 December 2012

The conference is designed to encourage reflection on both Australian effects in transnational circuits of meaning and ideas, but also the inherently interdisciplinary and global nature of Australian studies. The movement of ideas and people across Australian borders is mirrored in the academy, compelling an immensely productive, constantly shifting context for thought and contention that this Biennial InASA conference will showcase.

In Hindsight,

The New Zealand eResearch Symposium tookmplace recently.

Highlihgts can be found at digitalGLAM and eresearchNZ.

Convict Research

The State Library of Queensland has compiled a convict database of more than 123, 000 of the estimated 164, 000 convicts who were transported to Australia by the British government throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The database has been compiled from British Home Office (HO) records which are available on microfilm as part of the Australian Joint Copying Project (AJCP). The HO 11 Criminal – Convict Transportation Registers series has been indexed by the State Library of Queensland and the index contains the following information:

• Name of convict, including any known aliases
• Place of trial 
• Term of years
• Name of ship and date of departure
• Place of arrival
• Miscellaneous notes e.g. Died at sea; Ticket of Leave, etc.

More information on the sources used to compile the database is available here. Other sources relevant to convict research include the Picture Australia archive and Trove (Picture Australia has now been incorporated into Trove). Some Library Hack related applications which can be used to explore these convict records include Conviz and Convictbook. 
For more on Library Hacking see the site for the 2011 Libraryhack competition. See also the winners of the 2012 GovHack competition held by data.gov.au 
Other events which enable this kind of "Hacking" to take place include the NSW State Records Open Data Project, work taking place at the National Archives of Australia, the Trove Application Programming Interface (API), which replaced the unofficial Trove API developed by Tim Sherritt. 
It's also worth keeping an eye on the Mander Jones Award administered by the Australian Society of Archivists, which just had their annual conference in Brisbane. Next year's conference will take place in Canberra.
The State Records Digitization project is entitled "Future Proof".
There is also the ARC Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT, the Mapping Online Publics project, the Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI) Virtual Laboratory and courses on Digital History.
Also keep an eye out for Grants, including the Grants and Awards Scheme of the Australian National Library.
See also the upcoming National Digital Forum Conference in New Zealand.

Bran Nue Day

Creating and Visualizing Research Networks

Reflecting contemporary complexities associated with providing and consuming health, health research is inter- and multi-disciplinary. Program foci include:

• 1. Health Consumer Studies 
• 2. Health Professional Education, Professional Learning and Workforce Development 
• 3. Redesigning Health Services or Successful Health Service Redesign
• 4. Health literacy, knowledge management and emerging (digital) technologies
• 5. Health Communication 
• 6. The Body

This research is dispersed. 

• It takes place in multiple institutional locations (media studies, gender studies, cultural studies....
• It draws on multiple research methodologies. 
• It collects and analyses numerous forms of data, qualitative and quantitative, photography, film, social media.

This dispersed nature makes it difficult to create a research identity, articulate strengths and interests and identify important problems to address. There is a need to identify and visualize networks of relationships and Research Strengths.

Current investments in eResearch have focused on enabling scholars to collaborate on research projects, share data and research in virtual work environments - hence the investment in "Collaboration Infrastructure" (including cloud storage) that is taking place at UTS - where its is being supported by the Research IT Services Group; at a state level, where it is supported by Intersect (the UTS Intersect representative is Luc Small Intersect Projects include SURE, providing a secure, remote-access data analysis facility specifically for use by population health, health services and clinical researchers working with linked data) and also Federally, where it is supported by NeCTAR (National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources). See also the Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI) -  which is NeCTAR funded. Also useful is a program like a program like SEASR, which is being used by Ian Wood of the Digital Humanities Hub at ANU to identify patterns in a single text, or across broader entity categories and relations across a million words or a million books. SEASR is also useful because it can provide a visualization landscape.

An emphasis on mapping and visualizing research networks also fits under the heading of eResearch. 

Two recent projects involving mapping and visualizing networks and relationships include:

• The Black Loyalists run by Cassandra Pybus, Kit Candlin and Robin Petterd of USYD. The project traces webs of interconnection and patterns of slave family formation and kin networks. The complexity of the many interconnections required the development of a  network visualization that could provide an effective interpretative tool for the mass of complex and fragmentary data. The project maps relationships based on eleven criteria: 
•  Common names, similar testimony, proximity in the ship(s), proximity in Musters, proximity in tithable lists, proximity in ownership, kin relationship between owners, shared group membership, shared indenture or employment, common owner and appropriate ages

• Stanford's Republic of Letters project aims to create visualizations by mapping the writing and exchange of sixteenth and seventeenth century letters by merchants and missionaries which helped to create global information networks and colonial outposts. The Mapping draws its information from the Electronic Enlightenment, an online collection of 57,685 letters and documents from a wide range of correspondences. (The website is currently being update).

These examples use eResearch methods to analyze and organize historical data. However contemporary relationships between scholars (both intra- and inter- institutional) can also be mapped and visualized in the same way provided an appropriate taxonomy or list of categories or codes.