Tuesday, September 11, 2012

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


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)



 
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.

20-21st November
Wellington

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).

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.





Monday, September 3, 2012

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.