The Academy’s second annual Humanities, Arts and Culture Data Summit and third international DARIAH Beyond Europe workshop was held 27-29 March 2019 in Canberra.

An Australia-Europe knowledge exchange, convened by the Academy with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and the European Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities initiative (DARIAH), this event will explore new horizons for data-driven humanities and arts research, digital cultural collections and research infrastructure.

Download the program

Also see post-event reflections by ARDC and DARIAH and highlights on Twitter using #DARIAHBeyondEurope  and #HACDS2019

Select presentations are available from the event:

• Professor Jean Burgess, Director, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology — Digital methods and the future of communication and media research
• Ian Duncan, Acting Executive Director, Australian Research Data Commons — Digital research infrastructures for the arts and humanities: Sustainability, collaboration, vision, imagination, inspiration, advocacy and impact 
• Marco Fahmi (University of Queensland) and Dr Tyne Daile Sumner (University of Melbourne) — Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Virtual Laboratory
• Professor Jane Hunter — Director, Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network(AURIN) — The Future Directions of the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network 
• Dr James Rose — Indigenous Studies Unit, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health — Data Sovereignty in a Colonial Context: Towards an Integrated National Governance Framework for Australia
• Dr James Smithies, Director, King’s Digital Lab — Integrating DH into the longue durée: Research Laboratories, History, Methods

Knowledge Exchange session 1 —  Infrastructural challenges for large scale digital text corpora

• Professor Michael Haugh FAHA and Dr Simon Musgrave, University of Queensland, Australian National Corpus — Towards an Australian Language Data Commons: Lessons from the Australian National Corpus
• Associate Professor Antonija Primorac, University of Rijeka, Croatia — Infrastructural Challenges for Large Scale Digital Text Corpora: A View From the European Margins

Knowledge Exchange Session 1 Community Notes

Knowledge Exchange session 2 —  Geohumanities 

• Dr Bill Pascoe, University of Newcastle — Colonial Frontiers Massacres Map
• Dr Michael Rigby, University of Melbourne, AURIN — Georeferencing: Theory and challenges

Knowledge Exchange Session 2 Community Notes

Knowledge Exchange session 3 —  Audio-visual and new media and gaming

• Professor Jean Burgess, Director, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology — Digital methods in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre
• Professor Erik Champion, Curtin University and UNESCO Chair of Cultural Heritage & Visualisation — 3D-DH & VH Downunder

Knowledge Exchange Session 3 Community Notes

The way forward

In the final session of the program, the convenors hosted a discussion on infrastructure, sustainability, and international collaborations – where are we, and where might we go together? See Way Forward Community Notes.

The Academy’s inaugural Humanities, Arts & Culture Data Summit was held on 14-15 March 2018 in Canberra. For the first time in Australia, the summit bought together more than 100 delegates from universities, peak bodies, national cultural and collecting institutions, government departments, key projects and organisations, and National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) facilities to help frame a national HAC research infrastructure agenda.

An overview of the event’s themes and highlights is available online, signalling next steps and opportunities for improving frameworks for accessing, analysing and sharing Australia’s rich and vast HAC data collections. Highlights have been made on Twitter using #HACDS2018

Select presentations from the inaugural summit:

• Professor Linda Barwick FAHA (Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney) and Associate Professor Nick Thieberger (ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language) — PARADISEC Developments 2003-18
• Adam Bell, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies — Transforming the Archive: Digital preservation and access at AIATSIS
• Professor Robyn Owens (University of Western Australia and National Research Data Cloud (NRDC) and Adjunct Professor Rob Cook (NRDC Reference Group) — NRDC Future Design 
• Alison Dellit, National Library of Australia — Trove: Aggregator Host Platform Community 
• Professor Rachel Fensham, University of Melbourne — Research infrastructure for digital HASS at Melbourne: Research platforms, SCIP, and the Digital Studio
• Professor Mark Finnane FASSA FAHA, Griffith University — The Prosecution Project: Investigating the criminal trial in Australian history
• Andrew Gilbert, Bioplatforms Australia — National footprint, capability impact, and accessible infrastructure and data 
• Dr John La Salle, Atlas of Living Australia — The Atlas of Living Australia 
• Ingrid Mason, AARNet — Platforms for HASS
• Dr Steve McEachern, Australian Data Archive — The Australian Data Archive as infrastructure for the HASS community
• Roxanne Missingham, ANU — Data in the Humanities: Digital dancing
• Jan Müller, National Film and Sound Archive — Platforms for HASS: CLARIAH – A case study
• Professor Bert Roberts, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage — A Time Machine for Australia?
• Dr Merran Smith, Population Health Research Network — Experience and opportunities 
• Professor Julian Thomas FAHA, RMIT — Linked Semantic Platforms for Social and Urban Policy and Practice

The Australian Academy of Humanities, Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, the Australasian Council of Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities and the Australian Research Council (ARC) convened a one-day workshop on the Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) scheme for humanities and social sciences (HASS) researchers on Friday 18 October 2019 in Canberra.

HASS research is increasingly data-intensive and the LIEF scheme performs an important role in the Australian research infrastructure ecosystem. This workshop featured presentations and roundtable sessions with representatives from the Australian Research Council and past and current LIEF projects who shared insights on the application and assessment process, advice on developing partnerships, and strategies for success.

Presentations now available

• Professor Emma Baker, University of Adelaide – An Australian Rental Housing Conditions Data Infrastructure
• Professor Axel Bruns, QUT – TrISMA and Beyond: Building a National Social Media Collection
• Dr Steven McEachern, ANU Australian Data Archive – Planning for the future: from projects to platforms

Held on Wednesday 14 November 2018, the Colloquium celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the Cultural and Communication Studies Section of the Academy. The establishment of the Section was the result of a campaign led by the late Professor Ken Ruthven, a key moment of which was the Academy’s 1991 Symposium ‘Beyond the Disciplines: The new humanities’.

The event revisited some of the key topics discussed in that symposium – the discipline of cultural studies, multiculturalism, cultural policy studies, feminist/gender studies, and  postcolonial/subaltern studies – and discuss how our disciplines have moved on since then. Our focus will be on the theoretical, political, and institutional challenges they have confronted, the changing contexts in which they have evolved, and the directions in which we think they are headed.

Presenters included some of the founding Fellows of the Section, some newer Fellows, as well as early and mid-career researchers.

The event was convened by Professor Tony Bennett AcSS FAHA, Professor John Frow FAHA, Professor Elspeth Probyn FASSA FAHA and Associate Professor Chris Healy FAHA. The event was hosted by Professor Gerard Goggin FAHA in the Social Sciences Building at the University of Sydney.

We acknowledge and thank the University of Melbourne’s School of Culture and Communication, the University of Sydney’s Department of Media and Communications, and Western Sydney University’ Institute for Culture and Society for their generous support of this event.

Articles from the special edition of Cultural Studies Review Vol 25 No 2 (2019):

Shawna Tan – Sexuality in Cultural Studies: Doing Queer Research in Asia Transnationally

Crystal Abidin – Navigating Interdisciplinarity as a Precarious Early Career Researcher

Jill Bennett – Lived Experience and the Limits (and Possibilities) of Empathy

Julian Thomas – Inside the Institutions: Culture and Communication from Digital Transformations to Automation

Fran Martin – Australian cultural studies in an ‘Asian century’

Tim Rowse – Reconciliation as Public Culture: Taking Cultural Studies Beyond Ghassan Hage’s ‘White Nationalist’