Embedding the Human in Cultural Data: Research Software Engineering (RSE)

Cultural data collections are intended to document, archive, and share information and materials gathered from across the arts and humanities, broadly defined. While these collections reflect and instantiate many “human” endeavours, it can be easy to overlook human needs and experiences in their design, management, and execution. People searching, using, and contributing content to these collections have specific needs and requirements that must be reflected in systems architecture, interfaces, and management practices to ensure long-term sustainability and relevance of these collections.

This event will present details on current projects from the Australian Cultural Data Engine, positioned alongside broader discussions of theory, policy, and practices influencing our collections ecosystems. The day will be of interest to digital humanities and arts scholars, information scientists, software engineers, and GLAM sector practitioners.

Schedule

9.00 am: Welcome and Introductions (Neil Jakeman, King’s College London)

9:10 am: The “human” side of cultural data collections: Setting the stage (Prof Lisa Given, RMIT University & Associate Prof George Buchanan, University of Melbourne)

9:45 am: The cultural data collection landscape: An interactive discussion (Prof Lisa Given & Joann Cattlin, RMIT University)

10:30 am: Morning Tea

11.00 am: The importance of unique identifiers: A Hathi workset/ORCID development model (Associate Prof George Buchanan)

11:30 am: Design of Collections User Experience with Hackathons (Dr Mary Chester-Kadwell, Cambridge Digital Humanities)

11:50 am: Annotating Collections with IIIF (Dr John Moore, TNA)

12.10 pm: Lunch

12:40 pm: Considering Indigenous Data Sources (Neil Jakeman, King's Digital Lab)

1.00 pm: The Circus Oz Memory Booth Project & the Future of Cultural Collections (Prof Lisa Given)

1:30 pm: Final Reflections/Wrap-up (Neil Jakeman, Prof Lisa Given, Assoc Prof George Buchanan)

2.00 pm: Close

Interested participants are encouraged to participate in a funding workshop later in the week, focused on enabling future United Kingdom - Australian collaboration.

About ACD-Engine

The Australian Cultural Data Engine is a multidisciplinary project based at the University of Melbourne that harnesses leading cultural databases to analyse cultural production, artistic networks, and the socio-economic implications of arts and cultural data. We aim to improve the quality of cultural data available to researchers, industry and government and to facilitate interoperability across platforms, systems and regions.

About King’s Digital Lab

King’s Digital Lab (KDL) is based in the Faculty of Arts at King’s College London. We are more than software developers: we are Research Software Engineers (RSEs) with decades of collective experience working with researchers from a variety of disciplines to achieve their goals. We develop research solutions iteratively, using a range of tools and processes that can handle the most common challenges of digital research in the humanities and social sciences. We build resources designed to answer questions, store content, publish results, and push the boundaries of computationally- intensive research.