Seeking Registration for Potential Partnership Opportunity: ARDC Community Data Lab Project (Phase 2)

We’re seeking registration for potential partnership with the ARDC from GLAM organisations and organisations that specialise in eResearch training and data science for research to participate in Phase 2 of the Community Data Lab project, an innovative approach to rapid delivery of digital research infrastructure for researchers in humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS).

Community Data Lab Project

The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) is funding a Community Data Lab project to assist with the generation of focused platform(s) tools and collection subsets for open groups of researchers.

During a consultation undertaken in 2022 for the Trove Researcher Consultation Report, researchers said that humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) is not a single entity, and the researchers who fall in this domain have a multitude of diverse questions and approaches when interrogating data contained in archives and collections.

Participants in the consultation said that establishing a way to pool approaches for research could be of value, enabling researchers to use, re-use, and augment datasets in ways that enable additions and developments. Hence, the ARDC Community Data Lab (CDL) will not only enable sharing, but provide guidance on how to use the increasing range of tools and datasets, provide environments for running the tools, and options for researchers to analyse and annotate datasets.

It will be a platform that not only shares a number of instruments and infrastructures, but also provides governance and procedures that have protocols, and practices for managing and recording research as a process facilitating cross-institutional collaboration, enabling researchers to work collaboratively in groups and conduct open research.

Phase 1, centred on Trove as the primary data source, is on track for completion by December 2023.

For Phase 2, the vision is to expand the scope of tools, platforms, and services for researchers. To ensure a co-designed Phase 2 is conducted that aligns with the needs and interests of our broader community, the Phase 2 expansion aims to not only introduce new instruments and infrastructure but also to define comprehensive governance, protocols, and procedures that encompass research oversight and documentation.

Seeking Potential Partnerships

We are interested to hear from organisation(s) from any research or research-enabling organisation in Australia (academic or otherwise) looking to participate in the delivery of the second phase of the Community Data Lab. The first phase of the CDL project was built around the Trove API and this phase is expanding upon that.

In alignment with our strategy establishment of the Community Data Lab under the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons and architecture development, we are seeking potential partnerships broadly under 3 developmental areas of digital resource infrastructure, with a focus on use of these resources by researchers in the humanities, arts and social sciences:

Guidance

This category includes materials designed to assist researchers in applying analytical techniques and making use of data assets. These resources may take the form of web-based guides, tutorials, manuals, and executable code notebooks.

Workspace

This includes environments equipped with tools, services, and various resources that researchers use to ask and address their research inquiries effectively.

Repositories

This entails the locations where research data is stored, as well as the preservation of derivative works. These repositories may include platforms like Zenodo, Dryad, Trove, and institutional-level repositories where applicable.

Please refer to page 13 of the Community Data Lab architecture document for a high level overview of how these above developmental areas interact.

This registration will be followed by a phased process of co-design with researchers. The full parameters of the co-design phase will be determined after the registrations have been received. As part of this work, we intend to hold a co-design phase to determine the work packages to bring together digital research infrastructure providers with researchers involved and interested in delivering the work packages for phase two of the Community Data Lab.

Willingness to co-invest in the development of new guidance, or in aid of the consumption of workspaces or repositories/data assets will be considered favourably amongst this registration. Co-investment may be an equal input of cash, and/or an in-kind contribution of time towards development, with cash being the preferred form of co-investment.

The timeline for the second phase to be completed is estimated to be 30 June 2024 including the co-design phase commitment required to commence the delivery phase.

Tasks for Registration

This is not an invitation to submit proposals for projects. We are seeking a measure of interest and availability to undertake the work, as part of a process of co-design with the research community. Most importantly, we are seeking to understand what assets you’d like to promote for use by researchers in the humanities, arts and social sciences, as this will play a major role in the shape of the program of work.

Please provide:

the name of your organisation, and the place within the organisation that the expression is coming from
indication of any strengths in regards to one or a combination of the following:

Guidance

Documentation creation/training delivered to researchers for the use of data assets or the application of computational analytical techniques, and/or research data management

Workspaces

Capability of building computational notebooks, applying computational analytical techniques (e.g. statistical analysis, geospatial analysis, text analytics), creating, handling or transforming data, in response to specific questions arising in HASS research

Repository

Curating new data sources (especially in the GLAM sector) – does your organisation hold a significant amount of data that can be utilised by HASS researchers?

indication of any use of GitHub, Open Science Framework, language based tools such as R Studio, Jupyterhub (in the HASS area)
a statement on willingness (or otherwise) to co-invest in the activity
a rough indication of when you might be ready to undertake work (and what might precede that).

Submissions and Questions

Please direct any questions or submissions to [email protected]. The registration of potential partnership opportunities is sought until 15 December 2023 to support the ARDC with this piece of work.