ARDC Community Data Lab Co-design Workshop: Public Interest Documents

About the Event

The ARDC Community Data Lab (CDL) provides tools, datasets, analysis environments and collaboration options for humanities, arts, social sciences, and Indigenous research in Australia. As CDL enters its second phase, it will focus on co-designing 5 new capabilities to support research and research translation.

The ARDC invites you to a workshop to co-design one of these capabilities for making public interest documents more accessible to researchers. This is proposed to include an easy-to-use curated national Hansard (parliamentary proceedings and debates record) dataset and datasets documenting public inquiries and the submissions that have been made to them. These have been chosen to enable new and expanded HASS and Indigenous research and provide a foundation for making more documents more accessible. This co-investment opportunity aims to address the challenges HASS researchers face in consuming and analysing public interest datasets due to gaps and varied formats, which require significant technical skills.

The goal of the co-design workshop is to evaluate this co-investment opportunity to help develop a solution that supports new and expanded research.

Value of Capability to HASS and Indigenous Research

Public interest documents are records that shine light on the workings of government, including proceedings of Federal, State and Territory parliaments, submissions to public inquiries, public hearings, Ministerial diaries, and conflict of interest and lobbying registers. Significant efforts have been made to make these documents more openly available for interested parties over the past few decades. However, a ‘last-mile’ problem remains where most datasets of public interest documents are difficult to systematically consume and analyse. This limits the ability of the HASS and Indigenous research community to draw insights from these valuable data sets. This is partly because of gaps in the datasets and partly due to the wide variety of formats and structures used. Significant data transformation and processing is required to make them usable which requires specific technical skills and expertise. This leads to a lot of rework, repetition, and wasted effort on the part of researchers. Many valuable projects are abandoned before they even start due to the high cost for researchers to access these datasets.

Miss the workshop? You can still contribute

If you were unable to join the workshop, we still welcome your contributions. Please email ARDC’s Ellen Lyrtzis with the name of the capability you’d like to contribute to via [email protected].

What to expect during the Workshop

Workshop participants are expected to actively engage in discussions. During the workshop, participants will be introduced to the problem to be addressed, along with the capability that we are proposing to develop as a solution to this problem for HASS and Indigenous research.

The workshop will be held virtually via Zoom. Participants will join breakout rooms and respond to questions using a Miro board. Our goal is to gather feedback on the value of the proposed solution and to assess whether we’re addressing the problem in the most effective way.

The proposed solution has been developed by ARDC in partnership with the QUT Digital Observatory, The University of Queensland (UQ) and the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF).

After the workshop, we will publish a report that captures the input that we have received. Your insights will help us refine our approach, ensuring that we are on the right track. 

If you have difficulty accessing Zoom or Miro please let us know ahead of the workshop and we will provide alternative methods for you to provide your feedback.

Learn more about the ARDC Community Data Lab and the co-design process for phase 2 by watching the recording of our recent webinar, or viewing the slides.

Who will be speaking?

• Ellen Lyrtzis, Skills Development Lead (NCRIS), ARDC
• Dr Sam Hames, Research Fellow (Computational Humanities), School of Languages and Cultures, UQ

Who should attend?

• Researchers interested in working with Hansard records (including policy advisors and researchers working for public officials)
• Researchers interested in public inquiries and the submissions made to them
• Researchers interested in other public interest documents, such as registers of interests, ministerial diaries, and freedom-of-information documents.
• People who support researchers in their use of digital research infrastructure (including research infrastructure providers and digital skills trainers)

What participants will gain from the session?

• Contribute your use cases and experience with the capability
• Discuss the capability and the challenges it addresses with your peers
• Help shape how the capability will be delivered for HASS & I researchers

Join More Co-design Workshops for the ARDC Community Data Lab

The second phase of the CDL is focusing on co-designing 5 new capabilities to support research and research translation. Join other co-design sessions relevant to your research and work:

1. Curated Collections for Enduring HASS and Indigenous Data: help co-design a new national service to publish HASS and Indigenous data collections as websites. Tuesday 4 March 12 noon AEDT – register now
2. Framework For Research Software Engineers: help co-design a framework for recommended patterns in software engineering when working with HASS and Indigenous data. Friday 14 March, 12 noon AEDT – register now
3. Tools and Workflows for Visualising and Analysing Data Stored in RO-Crates: help co-design research tools and workflows for visualising and analysing data stored in RO-Crates. Tuesday 18 March 12 noon AEDT  – register now
4. Research Tools for Digitised Documents: help co-design tools and workflows for extracting, processing and searching text information from low-quality images of digitised documents and hand-written text. Tuesday 25 March 12 noon AEDT – register now 

Further HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons resources

• ARDC Community Data Lab Project
• HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons
• Resources for HASS and Indigenous research

Will the session be recorded?

To ensure participants’ privacy, we will not publish a recording of the workshop.