About the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC)
The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) is building Australia’s research data infrastructure. We provide Australian researchers with access to national research data collections, cloud computing, platforms and data-intensive research skills training.
For over 10 years, we have been providing services to researchers across Australia. We work with all universities in Australia, government agencies, overseas organisations and more.
How We Support HASS and Indigenous Researchers
Robert McLellan is Gooreng Gooreng and Industry Fellow and Program Manager at The University of Queensland working on the ARDC-supported Language Data Commons of Australia.
Robert McLellan
Professor Christopher Pettit leads the ARDC-supported project for housing data analytics.
Christopher Pettit
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You’ll also receive our fortnightly newsletter ARDC Connect, which shares latest news, events, training and resources for data-intensive research in Australia.
Free Tools for HASS and Indigenous Research
ARDC Community Data Lab
Digital tools and guides for researchers accessing and using data from libraries, archives, museums and other collections
The ARDC Community Data Lab helps researchers use tools and methods to find, access and use data from archives, museums and other collections.
It provides tools and guides for a range of common research tasks, including:
- text analysis
- data transformation
- annotating images.
The ARDC Community Data Lab is primarily focused on providing tools and resources for humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) researchers, however the tools can also be used by researchers from diverse domains. It also has a focus on providing guidance to researchers using Trove.
The Community Data Lab is a suite of services and guides that is growing over time in response to the needs of the research community. The following are available for researchers to use right now:
- Trove Data Guide, which describes what data is available via the National Library’s Trove service, and shows you how to find and access it
- GLAM Workbench – the Trove sections of the GLAM Workbench complement the Trove Data Guide, providing tools, code, and examples to help you work with data from Trove
- Glycerine, a workbench for annotating and publishing International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) images
- Stylometric Intelligent Archive (SIA), a stylometric analysis workbench
- ARDC computational notebook services, which allows you to run computational notebooks that mix textual detail with executable bits of code in a familiar document-like structure
- a spatio-temporal hotspot mapping data guide, including Jupyter notebooks demonstrating hot spot analysis, and for searching the Gazetteer of Historical Placenames using its API.
ARDC Nectar Research Cloud
Accelerate your research with cloud compute resources, software and data that can be accessed anywhere. Start your 6-month trial.
The Nectar Research Cloud allows fast, remote access to reliable computational capabilities, software and data.
Australian researchers can use the Nectar Research Cloud to develop and host services including databases, data repositories, web services and tools, and large-scale research platforms or virtual research environments.
We host services for earth and environmental science researchers on the Nectar Research Cloud, which can save time, boost your productivity, facilitate collaboration and give you added power to conduct your research:
Virtual Desktop Service
Access extra computing capabilities through any of the 6 desktops we offer, which you easily set up in minutes.
Jupyter Notebook Service
Develop, combine and export computational notebooks and interactive visualisations in Python, R and SciPy.
BinderHub Service
Turn your code, data and computational environments into shareable, executable and reproducible Binder environments that can easily be used by collaborators and colleagues.
National GPU Service
Reserve GPUs and large-memory virtual machines in 16 flavours in advance for your research.
Preemptible Instances service
Access extra computational resources for a short period of time on demand.
The Nectar Research Cloud also hosts digital services provided by ARDC-supported projects and other National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) facilities, including Australia’s spatial intelligence network AURIN.
Services include:
- Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI) – a database for Australian and Canadian cultural records
- Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)
- Digital Archive of Queensland Architecture – thousands of audiovisual and textual files that allow you to explore relationships between people, projects and firms
- Mindfields – helping school students develop skills for social and emotional wellbeing.
We provide hands-on cloud computing training for all researchers. Topics include getting started with the Nectar dashboard and basic security on the Nectar Research Cloud.
To access our cloud computing training, visit the Nectar Research Cloud Learning and Training Support Centre.
ARDC Research Link Australia
Find information about research, industry, business and government for impactful innovation.
The RLA platform is designed for:
- researchers and publicly funded research organisations to find business and industry partners to translate their research discovery into the development of real-world products
- industry and businesses to find research collaborators to enhance their research and development (R&D) capabilities
- policy makers and governments to gain a picture of the national research capability.
Currently, the service utilises information on the following:
- over 805,500 researchers from ORCID
- over 1.8 million publications as linked from ORCID profiles – publication records are mainly from PubMed and Crossref
- over 310,000 organisation records from the Registry of Research organisations (ROR), the Australian Business Registry (ABR), Crossref and Wikidata
- over 88,000 funded activities, either directly from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) or from ORCID profiles
- 132 instrument records from ARDC Research Data Australia.
You’ll be able to explore the data with interactive analytics dashboards for all research areas or specific domains, such as health and wellbeing research, and Aboriginal and Torre Strait Islander research. More dashboards will be added as more information on grants becomes available.
The ARDC is continuously incorporating a wider range of data sources (e.g. patent data), features and enhancements.
Introducing the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons
The HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons was established in 2021 to help institutions share data more freely, ethically and cooperatively, following the FAIR and CARE data principles as well as Indigenous data governance protocols.
The HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons has achieved joint resourcing of more than $40 million over the coming 4 years in partnership with research institutions, non-governmental organisations and government. It is delivering infrastructure in 6 focus areas:
- Improving Indigenous Research Capabilities
- Language Data Commons of Australia
- Social Science Research Infrastructure Network
- Connections
- ARDC Community Data Lab
- Summer School
- Australian Internet Observatory
- Australian Creative Histories and Futures