Ms. Evelyn Ansell1, Dr. Sam Hames2
1QCIF, Australia, 2The University of Queensland, Australia
Biography:
Evelyn Ansell is a PhD Candidate with the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland. She also works for Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation as a Data Scientist focused in the HASS field. Evelyn's research interests are in conversation, interaction and working practices, with related Research Infrastructure interests in text analysis, transcripts and documents more generally. She is an advocate for digital skills for Humanities researchers.
Dr. Sam Hames is a research fellow in computational humanities with UQ's School of Languages and Cultures and works on the Language Data Commons of Australia, a research infrastructure project in partnership with ARDC. Sam's PhD was on machine learning for medical imaging analysis, and he has an extensive background as a data-focused software developer supporting social media and web researchers. His primary research focus is to understand how computation can enable new and old kinds of interpretive inquiry across the humanities.
Abstract:
The need for a skilled Research Infrastructure (RI) workforce is well established. The discourse tends to focus on people supporting physical infrastructure, however we would like to advance the discussion about when the people ARE the infrastructure in the form of what we are calling team-expertise.
Team-expertise is the result of iterative conversations and collaborations between technical specialists and researchers. In its most ideal form, this results in a team of people where the researchers are data literate and adept at translating complex discipline-specific epistemologies to the technical specialists, who participate in the collaboration as deeply and develop profound understandings in turn.
We argue that team-expertise meets the properties of infrastructure as described by Star (1999), in that team-expertise is (amongst other things) embedded, transparent, learned as part of membership, links with conventions of practice, and becomes visible upon breakdown. But team-expertise currently occurs as a by-product: an incidental yet extremely valuable natural consequence of projects with other defined deliverables. Instead, it should be considered a valid output of RI projects and funding.
We suspect that the status quo comes from traditional academic metrics, which makes this simply a problem of measurement. Output in the form of team-expertise is not clear to measure, report on, or assess as a deliverable. However, we are researchers and research-adjacent professionals and as such can surely develop and promote standard ways to consider teams and their expertise as RI.
Star, S. L. (1999). The ethnography of infrastructure. American behavioral scientist, 43(3), 377-391.