KEY OUTCOMES

1. Poster Displays

All invitees to the workshop, whether attending in person or not, were invited to submit a poster display:

  • briefly describing the project's aims and background;
  • identifying needs and issues pertinent to digital resource creation and use in the project's disciplinary area;
  • mentioning any infrastructural developments needed to assist the project to realise its full potential.

Those attending the workshop had an opportunity to speak briefly to their posters. This session was very stimulating, and led into a wide-ranging discussion of the potential of the proposed e-Humanities network to generate fresh, innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to humanities research activity.

The following units and projects submitted posters:

  • Archaeological Computing Laboratory (Ian Johnson, University of Sydney).
  • The Authentic Electronic Editions project (Paul Eggert, ADFA, UNSW).
  • The Digital Dictionaries project (Jane Simpson, Linguistics, University of Sydney).
  • PARADISEC, the Pacific and Digital Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (Linda Barwick).
  • The Computational Stylistics Facility (Hugh Craig, Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing, University of Newcastle).
  • The Strehlow project (Sid Newton, Hart Cohen and Peter Dallow, School of Communication, Design & Media, University of Western Sydney).
  • Three projects from the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne (Bharat Dave):
    • Digital Reconstruction of Chartres Cathedral;
    • CAEV, the Collaboratory for Architectural and Environmental Visualisation; and
    • Cultural Immersion in Virtual Places.
  • Three projects from the Distributed Systems Technology Centre, a National IT Research and Development Centre focussing on the needs of the Government, Defence, Health, Telecommunications, Finance and Education Sectors (Jane Hunter):
    • Indigenous Knowledge Management;

    • The PANIC project;
    • The vannotea project;

2. Presentation on the Arts and Humanities Data Service

Following an introduction and welcome to the workshop by the workshop convenor, Professor Margaret Harris, Alastair Dunning gave a presentation on the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), a UK national service funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee and the Arts and Humanities Research Board, for which he is Communications Manager. The AHDS aids the discovery, creation, and preservation of digital collections in the arts and humanities.

Click here for a dot-point summary of this presentation.

3. Presentation on the ANU Internet Futures Project

Markus Buchhorn, Head of ANU Internet Futures and Grid Services coordinator for Grangenet, made a presentation on the possibilities of broadband networking and datagrid technologies for supporting e-Humanities research projects.

These two programmes provide a foundation infrastructure (a network, and middleware services) to support eResearch and eLearning activities, and do so across Australia. We work across the spectrum, at the layer below the application/users. Our aim is to always be guided what users actually need. One example is our involvement to assist PARADISEC at the infrastructure and service layer. We are also heavily involved with several other ARC Research Network proposals, and with various international collaborations in these areas.

4. A stocktake of the current state of Australian e-humanities research (e-Humanities Latitude and Longitude)

For this morning session on Day Two, participants divided into three groups:

5. Emerging Possibilities for e-Humanities Research (New Forms)

Once again, participants divided into three groups for discussion of cutting-edge research possibilities:

6. Planning of the Network Structure

In this session Sheila Anderson and Alastair Dunning from the Arts and Humanities Data Service responded to the issues raised at the workshop with some suggestions for possible structures.