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.
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.
BY KENDREA RHODES – This work is an audiovisual expression of the messiness of being me. A visual artist, a writer, doctoral researcher, and a psychiatric survivor.
BY ISABELLA G. MEAD – This creative response to ‘How Life Gets In’ details my experience maintaining a creative practice while also being a PhD candidate and a parent to young children.
BY LAINIE ANDERSON – Life didn’t get in the way of my PhD. Death did. Or more specifically, it was South Australia’s Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill (2020).
BY DANTE DeBONO – ‘Degrees of separation’ is a reflective consideration of the ways in which creators navigate the complexity of their internal writing processes as unique configurations of their lived experiences.
BY SMILJANA GLISOVIC — With the first edition for the year we’re going into the NiTRO archives to trace how some of the key concerns of the last 12 months have developed since the start of the DDCA publication.
BY NATALIE KRIKOWA — This research critically examines the evolution of queer representation in screen media and interrogates whether meaningful progress has been made.
In ‘The long and winding road’ (NiTRO, Edition 20, 2019), Professor Carol Gray offers up ‘an alternative way of considering the role of artefacts / creative works in a doctoral submission, by offering the liberating concept of ‘epistemic objects’ – their possible forms and agencies, and the alternative display/sharing of the understandings generated from these […]
SMILJANA GLISOVIC—This edition of NiTRO Creative Matters takes its theme from this year’s DDCA annual symposium Thrive, with an attendant interest in Leadership. For some time the DDCA Board and membership have been discussing the necessary relationship between thriving and leadership, identifying that for creative practice researchers to continue to thrive, and for the field to continue to develop, we need to cultivate our leaders. In our visioning of creative practice researchers stepping into leadership positions we need to explore what leadership looks like for the creative practice researcher and the disciplines we work in.
