Building Australia’s Research Future: Getting the A in the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons
JENNY FEWSTER'S address at the 2023 DDDCA symposium compiled by MARY FILSELL
On November 3, 2023, Jenny Fewster, Director, HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons (RDC), Australian Research Data Commons, addressed the Deans and Directors of Creative Arts conference with her talk, “Getting the A into the HASS and Indigenous RDC.” Her objective was twofold: to shed light on the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and, more specifically, the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and Indigenous Research Data Commons (HASS and Indigenous RDC), and to extend an invitation to the audience of the Deans and Directors of Creative Arts conference to participate in the largest investment in HASS infrastructure Australia has ever witnessed.
The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC)
The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) serves as Australia’s peak research data infrastructure facility, dedicated to accelerating research and innovation by fostering excellence in the creation, analysis, and retention of data assets. Over the past decade, the ARDC has collaborated with researchers, universities, government agencies, and international organisations to establish cutting-edge digital research infrastructure, offering Australian researchers a competitive advantage through data.
Demystifying Research Data Commons
A ‘Research Data Commons’ (RDC), is a virtual space that brings together people, skills, data, and associated resources to facilitate world-class data-intensive research. Guided by the FAIR and CARE principles, these RDCs ensure data is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable, where ethically possible, a critical foundation for collaborative research.
Over 25 Million invested into the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons
Soon after Jenny Fewster’s presentation, the ARDC publicly announced that the ARDC-led HASS and Indigenous RDC received the largest ever investment in HASS research infrastructure in Australia. The $25 million grant from the Australian Government’s 2023 National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) Funding Round, along with co-investment from national partners, will enable continuation of the delivery of long-term, enduring national digital research infrastructure to support HASS and Indigenous researchers in Australia.
This grant is in addition to the $8.9 million received from NCRIS to establish the HASS and Indigenous RDC, which was launched in 2021.
“We welcome the Australian Government’s investment in establishing research infrastructure to support researchers to harness research data to enhance Australian social and cultural wellbeing, and help understand and preserve our culture, history and heritage.”
Jenny Fewster
Achievements: HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons
Projects of the HASS and Indigenous RDC currently include:
the Language Data Commons of Australia
The Integrated Research Infrastructure for Social Sciences
Improving Indigenous Research Capabilities
the ARDC Community Data Lab.
Creative Arts and Expansion Plans
The new funding ensures the continuous expansion of the HASS and Indigenous RDC until 2028, broadening its scope to include media(ted) data and the Creative Arts. This extension is aimed at providing enduring digital infrastructure to meet Australia’s future research needs.
Co-Design Approach
The ARDC’s co-design and co-investment approach will involve collaboration with the HASS and Indigenous research community, including a call to the Creative Arts research community to help shape programs and projects aligning with community-identified digital infrastructure requirements.
The HASS and Indigenous RDC is one of 3 national-scale Thematic Research Data Commons led by the ARDC in partnership with the research community. The Thematic Research Data Commons are designed to meet Australia’s future research needs with long-term, enduring digital infrastructure.
The new funding from the Australian Government will be invested through the ARDC’s co-design and co-investment approach to building digital research infrastructure. As leaders in the Creative Arts, your insights are invaluable to shaping the future of data driven research infrastructure in the Creative Arts.
In early 2024, we will work with the HASS and Indigenous research community, including the creative arts community, to co-design the programs and projects that will meet the digital infrastructure needs of researchers now and in the future. We invite you to get involved by registering your interest in the HASS and Indigenous RDC.
The HASS and Indigenous RDC also integrates the ARDC’s underpinning compute, storage infrastructure and services, including the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud. It is supported by our extensive expertise, and work on developing community-agreed standards and best practices. The program is also upskilling researchers from research institutions and Indigenous-owned organisations to use data-driven approaches to HASS and Indigenous research.
These coordinated, structured, and complementary activities are building data assets, tools, and skills that will constitute a national ‘knowledge infrastructure’ that enables Australian researchers to transform our lives.
We invite the Creative Arts community to help shape the development of digital research infrastructure. Get involved in upcoming consultations by registering your interest in the HASS and Indigenous RDC.
Jenny Fewster is Director of HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons. Jenny has over 20 years’ experience in collecting, managing and disseminating research and cultural heritage data and resources, Jenny is passionate about delivering quality research infrastructure and data to meet the diverse needs of HASS and Indigenous researchers.
Mary Filsell is a Data Consultant (SA, WA & NT) with Australian Research Data Commons. Backed by over 20 years supporting and promoting research across HASS and STEM, Mary is passionate about connecting researchers with competitive advantage through data and driving excellence in their creation, analysis and retention of high-quality data assets.
GUEST EDITOR JANE W. DAVIDSON — Extreme weather events have been experienced in so-called Australia for millennia. This settler painting shows the terror and chaos captured by William Strutt in a depiction of Black Thursday, February 6th 1851 (painted in 1864 and now part of the State Library of Victoria’s Pictures Collection). From records of the time, around five million hectares burnt, which amounts to a staggering quarter of Victoria, and on the same day, with temperatures over 43 degrees Celsius in the shade, large swathes of western Tasmania also burnt.
BY CLAIRE HOOKER and ANNA KENNEDY-BORISSOW — It is well recognised that one of the hallmarks of climate change is an increase in the frequency and severity of disasters (IPCC, 2023). The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR, 2007) defines disasters as a ‘serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society,’ and these disruptions result from interactions between hazards and human systems (Peek et al., 2021; Perry, 2018).
BY SUSANNE THUROW, HELENA GREHAN AND JANE W. DAVIDSON — In this short paper, we aim to explore the potential role creative arts might play in fostering community preparedness in view of the increasing extreme weather scenarios playing out across the globe.
BY PETA TAIT — This article outlines ARC funded research about the representation of ecological damage and climate change in Australian drama, theatre and contemporary performance. The project summary is followed by a brief discussion of artistic depictions of fire and disaster that refers to a community-based play based on the lived experience of its audience, and a performative work in which participants rehearse for a future disaster.
BY SARAH WOODLAND AND LINDA HASSALL — The escalation of ecological crises and climate-related disasters is impacting individual health and community wellbeing globally. The World Health Organization has highlighted that 3.6 billion people now live in regions highly susceptible to climate change, and the health impacts will cost economies US$2-4 billion per year by 2030 (WHO 2023).
BY BELINDA SMAILL — This essay explores how screen aesthetics have been deployed in our new era of fire. In Australia this era is marked by Black Saturday in 2007 and the Black Summer fires of 219/20. As both public knowledge and fire events have evolved the filmmaking community has responded with a largely documentary focused body of work. Examining this new turn in film and television’s narrative and visual interest in fire, I couch this study within Australia’s cinematic history of fire, recognising its intersection with the environmental history of fire and this new phase: the Pyrocene.
BY JANE W. DAVIDSON, SARAH WOODLAND AND GILLIAN HOWELL — This short paper investigates the potential use of opera for enabling sharing and recovery from extreme weather events. Opera, which might be conceived of as storytelling using a combination of words, music, acting, costumes, and set, has a European origin dating back to 1600 (Davidson, Halliwell & Rocke, 2021).
BY DENNIS DEL FAVERO, SUSANNE THUROW, MAURICE PAGNUCCO, URSULA FROHNE — The climate emergency presents an existential global crisis resulting from the combined processes of global warming, atmospheric, hydrospheric, biospheric and pedospheric degradation. The IPCC report of 2023 found that extreme climate events are rapidly increasing around the globe, with projections indicating that they will become more frequent and severe, with impacts intensifying and interacting.
BY JOSHUA IP – The interrogation of practice is a common task faced by practice-based researchers. As a PhD candidate the Practice Research Symposium programme in the School of Media and Communications at RMIT, focusing on the discipline of Creative Writing, I have attempted to interrogate my wide-ranging practice as poet, editor and literary organiser for the past six years.
BY ANNE M. CARSON – Disrupting, interrupting and sometimes derailing study in both welcome and unwelcome ways; life gets into PhD projects in a plethora of ways, so much so that there often seems to be no hard boundary between them. This essay uses the example of synchronicity as one way that ‘life gets in’.
BY PATRICIA AMORIM — In my Palimpsest Series, I explore cultural identity from a feminist perspective through self-portraiture, drawing inspiration from the concept of a palimpsest and the work of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta.
BY JENNY HEDLEY – In this reflective essay, a time-poor single mother and PhD candidate accidentally takes on the role of basketball coach as she seeks to achieve balance between scholastics and life.
BY MICHAEL DONEMAN – Between is a reflection on loss and renewal. It interweaves personal, cultural, and environmental stories near the country where I live, by a waterway at the edge of the Boondall Wetlands called Cabbage Tree Creek.
BY CLAIRE WELLESLEY-SMITH – The use of textile as a creative recording method alongside my PhD (2023, The Open University) extended a practice I began in 2013. Stitch Journal is a long length of linen cloth, pieces added in sections.
BY SUSIE CAMPBELL – Before an unexpected brush with serious illness, the journey of my PhD research project seemed clear. I set out to engage with the avant-garde Modernist poetry of Gertrude Stein in order to draw on her experimental approach to language for my own processual model of poetic practice.
BY EMILY WOTHERSPOON – This piece is a reflection on how life, research, and creative practice become blurred and intertwined through the process of undertaking PhD creative writing practice research.
BY DANI NETHERCLIFT – This work, in alignment with the topic of my creative arts PhD regarding the elegiac lyric essay, is written with the conventions of the lyric essay, utilising white space, non-linearity, image, archive, fragment, association and braiding.
BY INDYANA HOROBIN – This is a short experimental article that engages with how life subsists within PhD study. It is styled as an interview with the self and is punctuated by interactions between the interviewers which descend into hostile conversations.
