Designing a national “Virtual Laboratory” for the humanities

Toby Burrows

The Australian HuNI project

NeCTAR Project• National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources

• Australian government funding programme (part of SuperScience initiative): A$47 million (2010-2013)

• Programmes: Virtual Laboratories (5) Research Cloud (4) eResearch Tools (15) National Servers (2)

www.nectar.org.au

Virtual Laboratories (Stage 1)

• The Genomics Virtual Laboratory (GVL) (lead: University of Queensland)

• Climate and Weather Science Laboratory (lead: Bureau of Meteorology)

• The Characterisation Virtual Laboratory: Research Environments for Exploring Inner Space (lead: Monash University)

• The All-Sky Virtual Observatory (lead: Astronomy Australia Ltd)

• Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI): Unlocking and Uniting Australia's Cultural Data (lead: Deakin University)

Virtual Laboratories:What are they?

NeCTAR criteria• Cross-institutional

• Cross-disciplinary

• Integration of existing data

• Integration of existing tools

• Data-centred workflows

• Collaboration

HuNI responses• Multiple institutions (13

partners)

• All humanities disciplines

• Cultural datasets pooled as Linked Data

• Existing tools adapted to work with Linked Data

• Linked Data + tools

• Collaborative tools

Digital Object Collections

Publications

Descriptions / M

etadata

Annotations

Excerpts

Representations

Classifications

Exhibitions

RESEARCHERS INSTITUTIONS

Citations

Collections

Entities layer (Linked Data)

HuNI: Cultural datasets

• Australian Dictionary of Biography

• AustLit (Australian literature)

• AusStage (performing arts)

• Design and Art Australia Online

• Cinema and Audiences Research Project

• AUSTLANG: Australian Indigenous Languages Database

• AIATSIS Mura catalogue (Australian indigenous materials)

• bonza: National Cinema and Television Database

• Australian Media History Database

• Circus Oz Living Archive Video Collection

• Australian Film Institute Research Collection

• Dictionary of Sydney

• Trove (National Library of Australia) ?

• Vocabularies: PeopleAustralia (National Library of

Australia) Gazetteer of Australia (Geoscience

Australia) Object Name Thesaurus (Powerhouse

Museum)

HuNI: Tools

• OHRM (University of Melbourne): modelling entity relationships and publishing information about collections into aggregated frameworks

• LORE (University of Queensland): annotation, federated searching, visualisation, aggregation and sharing of compound digital objects

• Heurist and FieldHelper (University of Sydney): aggregating data, modelling entity relationships and publishing collections of data to the Web (including maps and timelines)

• MaVRec (RMIT University): building virtual collections

• EoPAS (PARADISEC – Sydney and Melbourne): annotating audio and video files

• OCCAMS (Australian National University): annotation, analysis and management of online cultural collections

• AusStage (Flinders University of South Australia): visualisation and mapping

• VIVO (Cornell University): Linked Data storage, management and publishing

HuNI timeline

• May 2012: Contract signed

• June 2012: Project Manager appointed

• Oct. 2012: Linked Data Server, APIs for initial group of datasets – DAAO, ADB, OHRM databases, Dictionary of Sydney, AIATSIS AUSTLang

• Apr. 2013: Initial tools – search and browse, authentication, annotation, compound object publishing, virtual collections

• Nov. 2013: APIs for second group of datasets, Semantic Mediation and Mapping Service, remaining tools

• Dec. 2013: Completion! And handover...

Key HuNI personnel

Prof. Deb Verhoeven (Deakin University): Community Lead

Dr Toby Burrows (UWA): Information Architect & Community Liaison Coordinator

Alex Hawker (VeRSI): Project Manager

Conal Tuohy (VeRSI): Technical Coordinator

Ingrid Mason (Intersect): Information Services Coordinator

Communications Officer – to be appointed

“HuNI as a scholarly collaboration system” (Steven Hayes, University of Sydney)