Sustainable data from digital research: Humanities perspectives on digital scholarship

This conference held in December 2011 at the University of Melbourne addressed the field of digital humanities scholarship from the perspective of methods for improving research outcomes by better use of technology. Digital methods for recording information are now ubiquitous. In fieldwork-based disciplines, like linguistics, musicology, anthropology and so on, recordings are typically of high cultural value and there is great benefit in the proper curation of these recordings, to the researcher, to the community in which they worked, and to the broader society. What are the costs and benefits of these technologies? How can we: ensure the longevity of the data we record access our own data over time provide public access to publicly funded research data (including dealing with ethical and IP issues) provide data to the people we record, especially to those who have little access to computers or the internet ensure that our research processes and analysis take maximum advantage of the access to data provided by digital methods embed our analysis in accessible data to allow verification of our claims enable research based on digital data from archival sources develop tools and processes that accumulate data in standards-conformant format? Papers from the conference addressing these issues are now available to download.   Image: flag75* / flick