Sustainable data from digital research: Humanities perspectives on digital scholarship

Dates: 12-14th December 2011

Venue: University of Melbourne, Australia

A PARADISEC conference

Most presentations from the conference are now available for viewing at http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/7890.

See the conference schedule and a list of presentations.

Click here for a pdf of the program and here for a pdf of the abstracts.

A map of the University of Melbourne can be found here: http://maps.unimelb.edu.au/parkville.

A map of places to eat lunch can be found here.

Theme of the 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?

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

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.

Keynote speaker - Stephen Ramsay

Department of English, Lincoln, NE, USA.

Stephen Ramsay is an Associate Professor of English and a Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He designs and builds text technologies for humanist scholars, and has lectured widely on subjects related to literary theory and software design for the humanities. His book, *Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism*, will be published by University of Illinois Press later this year. See his blog: http://lenz.unl.edu/. His plenary is titled 'Found: Data, Textuality, and the Digital Humanities'

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. See the University of Melbourne site here: http://www.conferences.unimelb.edu.au/fuzzy/Accommodation.html but please be aware that we have NOT arranged any special rates with any of these hotels or colleges.

There will be no registration fee.

Ten of the papers from this conference appear in a peer-reviewed volume available as a book for purchase at the conference (or online at the Melbourne University bookshop) and hosted in an open-access online repository at Sydney University.

Supported by the School of Languages & 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.