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.
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CREATIVE EMPOWERMENT OR CRITICAL DISSOLUTION? — This paper investigates the pronounced tension between ‘creative empowerment’ and ‘critical dissolution’ at the
DEVELOPING THE TRANSDISCIPLINARY INQUIRY MODEL IN CREATIVE PRACTICE RESEARCH — This article reflects on the development of the Transdisciplinary Inquiry
INTEGRATING FAMILY ADDICTION TRAUMA THROUGH EMBODIED CREATIVE RESEARCH — This article explores how the phenomenon of ‘affective ambush’(Maguire & Deller
NAVIGATING CULTURAL TRANSLATION IN PHOTOGRAPHIC PRACTICE RESEARCH — This paper examines the methodological tensions and transformations in my practice-led research exploring photographic representation of gendered bodies across Brazilian and Australian cultural contexts. Through analysing my evolving methodology, I demonstrate how convergence of feminist epistemology, decolonial theory, and photographic practice generates new knowledge at the intersection of theory and creative production.
This paper reflects on a methodology within a Creative Writing PhD that recalibrates selected Buddhist Pāli Jātakas through a parallel reading of Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Buddhist texts on samsarā (rebirth). This cross-cultural dialogue provides a nuanced context for rearticulating the Jātakas. The project’s ‘middle-way methodology’ avoids privileging either Western or Buddhist frameworks and adapts Smith and Dean’s (2009) ‘iterative cyclic web’ through oscillations across creative writing, cross-cultural reading, and critical inquiry.
GENDER’S PRESENCE IN GENDERLESS NARRATIVES — In an experimental attempt to avoid all gendered markers while writing my unpublished novel, Static Sun, Phantom Breath, traces of gender seemed to still appear and, in turn, complicate the presence/absence binary. Inspired by Anne Garréta’s novel Sphinx and her exploration of how genderless characters expand understands of love and writing form, this paper reflects on the logocentric restrictions and aporetic opportunities that come from textually avoiding gender.
'The past inside the present' (2023) begins with surfaces: inscribed, weathered, and imbued with pedagogical significance. The research involves reconsidering reclaimed art school studio tabletops as artefacts of accumulated gestures. It focuses on investigating how artistic labour and the relational custodianship of educational practices become systematically blurred within contemporary institutional frameworks of higher education.
CREATIVE EMPOWERMENT OR CRITICAL DISSOLUTION? — This paper investigates the pronounced tension between 'creative empowerment' and 'critical dissolution' at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cyberpunk, a genre defined by its critical engagement with technology. Grounded in my reflexive practice of generating cyberpunk transmedia (images) using AI, this study analyses how these tools – despite affording creative efficiencies and expanded visual capabilities – may undermine cyberpunk's intrinsic critical spirit, DIY ethos, and narrative depth.
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As a creative researcher-in-the-making, I am exploring how to practice accountability in the unresolved cultural context of the environmental crisis and ongoing intersectional colonising injustice. To address this, I have developed a sidewise ethics of practice that begins with my own unresolved settler cultural understanding of the foreshores of the city of Wollongong on the New South Wales South Coast.
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STRANGE LOOP METHODOLOGY AND THE WRITER AS RESEARCHER — This article presents Smelting, a lyrical-poetic-prose hybrid that performs creative writing as recursive inquiry through Boyd’s Strange Loop methodology. The work loops through narrative, reflection, and fragmentation to explore writing in the Anthropocene where meaning, identity, and climate collapse entangle. The writer is positioned not as commentator but as participant and epistemic agent, embodying the writer-as-researcher ethos within a practice-based research PhD.
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BY DARIO VACIRCA — In the age of virality, censorship is a risky business. We’ve seen it play out time and time again: an attempt to bury an idea or image only ends up amplifying it.
BY NADIA ODLUM — This contribution draws upon my experience researching and learning within an adventure playground, and considers what these environments (and the people who facilitate them) might teach us about conditions that allow for a positive approach to risk.
BY FIONA HILLARY, CAMERON BISHOP and DAVID CROSS — Since the pandemic further upended certainties about what a university should do to build culture, our once bustling campuses have increasingly come to resemble empty husks – hollowed out not just by lockdowns and the attendant absence from campus, but by decades of neoliberal corporatisation.
BY PAULINA LAROCCA — Risk – from the Italian risicare, ‘to dare’ – carries both danger and possibility, offering transformative rewards when one embraces uncertainty (Bernstein, 1996).
