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?
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 work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Recent Submissions

• The Digital Nehan Songbook Project 

  Olstad, John

  Published 2011-01-01

  The Digital Nehan Songbook project seeks to add native language songs to the broader project of describing and documenting Nehan, an Oceanic language spoken on Nissan Island of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua ...

  Open Access

  Conference paper
  View

• Roundtable on the ethics of making publicly available historical data 'more' public through linkage and database construction 

  Kippen, Rebecca; McCalman, Janet; Silcot, Sandra; Smith, Len

  Published 2011-01-01

  Over recent decades there has been a burgeoning of individual-level population data available from historical records, including censuses, and birth, death and marriage registers. These can be linked to other historical ...

  Open Access

  Conference paper
  View

• Online presentation of media and text. Foundations for verification of analyses. 

  Thieberger, Nick; Nordlinger, Rachel

  Published 2011-01-01

  Schroeter and Thieberger (2006) reported on the development of EOPAS, a method for presenting interlinear text together with the media it transcribes, using timecodes to access points in the media correlated to corresponding ...

  Open Access

  Conference paper
  View

• Community-based website building: The Language Documentation Training Center’s approach to mentor-mentee partnership 

  Butler, Katie

  Published 2011-01-01

  Since its founding in 2004, the Language Documentation Training Center (LDTC) at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa has helped more than 80 participants publish web sites documenting various aspects of their native languages ...

  Open Access

  Conference paper
  View

• Digital representation and the use of shared texts: the case of a theatrical prompt book 

  Fiormonte, Domenico; Schmidt, Desmond

  Published 2011-01-01

  The digitisation of cultural textual artefacts is focussed on conservation in digital archives and on the information retrieval tools for which they are designed. Many such artefacts, however, exist only in the form of ...

  Open Access

  Conference paper
  View

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