Birds of a Feather session Digital Humanities Australasia 2018

The DEVL’s playground: The Humanities and Social Sciences Data Enhanced Virtual Laboratory (HASS DEVL) (90)

Alexis Tindall , Ingrid Mason , Greg D'Arcy , Kylie Brass

You’ve heard that expression ‘the devil is in the detail’ – now get ready to hear about the detail in the DEVL.  

The Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) Data Enhanced Virtual Laboratory (DEVL), aka Tinker, is a collaborative project about data sharing and transfer between archives, institutions and research projects. Tinker brings together fragmented data, tools and services into a shared workspace.

The driving forces behind the project are:

  • Lowering barriers to entry for HASS infrastructure
  • Increased interoperability between existing HASS platforms
  • More joined up data landscape
  • Data curation for better reuse, reproduction, and publishing of research data sets
  • Game-changing skills and training activities

Twelve Australian organisations, from universities to government and the GLAM sector, are currently working together to improve HASS digital research infrastructure. Part of this approach is the development of a HASS workbench environment that enables access to three tools for transcription, text analysis and geocoding. The project is also developing a national HASS skills and training framework that supports the uptake of the workflows, data curation framework and the workbench.

This Birds of a Feather session will discuss challenges and progress so far, and describe what it is like to work on a collaborative and dynamic national project with the goal of providing infrastructure that supports the HASS research community in a scalable and sustainable manner.

We will include some real life research applications enhanced as a result of the achievements so far, present some of the Grand Challenges for a project of this nature and offer more detail about how your research could be enhanced through the work of the DEVL.