HASS Research Data Commons Kicks Off

The Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) Research Data Commons is kicking off.
Hass

As announced in November, the Australian Research Data Commons is excited to be developing the Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) Research Data Commons, which represents a $8.9m investment by the Australian Government to help build a national HASS and Indigenous digital research infrastructure that will create new tools and platforms to extend researcher capacity.

The HASS Research Data Commons Program Manager, Jenny Fewster, started in her position with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) a few weeks ago, and will begin a series of meetings with key stakeholders as part of the information sharing and consultation process for the program.

The HASS Research Data Commons will help institutions share data more freely, ethically and cooperatively following the FAIR data principles and Indigenous data governance protocols maintained by the Indigenous Data Network.

The infrastructure will enhance research in a broad range of fields including education, cultural studies, linguistics, history, economics, commerce, tourism, law and legal studies, the creative arts and Indigenous HASS digital research infrastructure.

Kicking Off the HASS Research Data Commons

Over the coming weeks, Jenny will be meeting with key stakeholders around Australia virtually and in person where possible. Her next round of meetings will be with a wider group of institutions involved in HASS to discuss the opportunity to join the project as partners.

The ARDC will then be undertaking wider consultation with the HASS community on the research data commons via webinars in the coming months.

The 4 Streams of the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons

The HASS Research Data Commons is initially comprising three streams alongside the Indigenous HASS program.

  1. Developing the Linguistics Data Commons of AustraliaThis platform will capitalise on existing infrastructure, rescue vulnerable and dispersed collections, and link with improved analysis environments for new research outcomes.

  2. Developing a Trove researcher platform for more advanced researchComplementing existing National Library of Australia resources, this platform will enable a focus on the delivery of researcher portals accessible through Trove, Australia’s unique public heritage site. This platform will create tools for visualisation, entity recognition, transcription and geocoding across Trove content and other corpora.

  3. Integrated social sciences research infrastructureThis platform will expand existing social sciences initiatives and provide a coordinated governance model for access to data. This will improve the capacity of researchers to access, preserve and disseminate quantitative and qualitative social sciences data sources. It will also drive the development of systems and tools for capturing new and emerging real time, or near real time, data.

Jenny will work in collaboration with the Indigenous HASS Research Program Coordinator to be appointed at the Indigenous Data Network (IDN) at the University of Melbourne, as part of the same Australian Government investment.

To register your interest in the HASS Research Data Commons, please contact us via the form at the bottom of the project page.