Dr Marissa Takahashi, Ms Elizabeth Alpert, Ms Alice Miller, Professor Daniel Angus, Adj Professor Sach Jayasinghe, Professor Richard Sinnott, Mr Luca Morandini, A/Prof George Buchanan, Mr Luc Betbeder-Matibet, Mr Thai Hoang Nguyen
1Queensland University Of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
Building research infrastructure is a challenge, particularly in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (HASS) domain with enormously diverse range of researchers and projects. There is no one-size-fits-all approach for obtaining, pre-processing, and analysing research data. Despite this heterogeneity, there are overlapping methods and skills that form part of the research data lifecycle including collecting, tidying, analysing, and publishing data. Some of these methods may arrange neatly within a single ‘commons’, while others are much harder to nail down.
The Australian Digital Observatory (ADO) was funded by ARDC in 2021 to support Australian researchers who work with digital human data from the internet (including social media data). The ADO is curating resources for the diverse needs and skills of these researchers. The ADO is fostering an ecosystem approach that aims to equip researchers with a set of modular, open source, interoperable methods and processes to assist with their tasks. Researchers can benefit from the ADO ecosystem by accessing tools, training, and project support services. This ecosystem approach gives flexibility, allowing researchers to pick and choose resources that are relevant and suitable for them, without being locked into a specific stack (e.g., proprietary formats/tools, cloud infrastructure), or situated within a singular commons.
In designing and curating the ADO ecosystem, we take inspiration from the open-source software community and the Unix philosophy of designing interoperable tools that each do one thing well, and from the R Tidyverse, which has demonstrated the suitability of such a structure to the academic research environment.
Biography:
Dr Marissa Takahashi is the manager of Digital Observatory at Queensland University Technology. Digital Observatory is a research infrastructure that enable researchers to track and analyse dynamic digital data on platforms like Twitter etc. She is also the project manager of the ARDC funded Australian Digital Observatory.