The Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences (HASS) and Indigenous research community faces a shortage of Research Software Engineering (RSE) expertise, leading to fragmented and inconsistent software development practices. While great progress has been made by individuals in the sector, the dissemination of tools and techniques is poor. This leads to inconsistent maturity and approaches across disciplines and research efforts.
Researchers and technical teams lack access to architectural guidance, technical roadmaps, recommended patterns guide and models to guide their work.
This produces inefficiencies in technical delivery, increases cybersecurity risk, and makes it difficult to sustain research software beyond individual projects. Without a coordinated effort to build RSE capability and common methods across the sector, the HASS and Indigenous research community will struggle to leverage computational methods and produce innovative, reproducible, secure, and sustainable digital outputs.
This is becoming increasingly important with the rise of ethically challenging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLM). Researchers will need guidance on how to technically and responsibly integrate them in the context of HASS and Indigenous research.
The Research Software Engineering Capacity Enhancement Project (RSE-CEP) will provide updated architectural principles, a technology roadmap, and detailed explanations of common RSE patterns for the HASS and Indigenous research community as part of the ARDC HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons Community Data Lab (CDL).
