Friday 3rd October 2008, Melbourne, Australia

Organisers

Mark Hedges, Tobias Blanke, Stuart Dunn: Centre for e-Research, King's College London;
John Byron: Australian Academy of the Humanities

Description of Workshop

This workshop aims to stimulate discussions between the UK and Australasian arts, humanities and cultural heritage communities about the use of e-Research infrastructures, services, technologies and methodologies. In recent years, several grass-roots initiatives in the UK culminated in a national e-Science programme for the arts and humanities. Early adopters are experimenting and systematically investigating what e-Research could mean for practitioners as diverse as musicologists, archaeologists or archivists of cultural heritage data. The workshop will compare, explore links and develop synergies between these activities and the emerging agenda for arts, humanities and cultural heritage e-Research in Australasia.

The workshop will focus on how the take-up of e-Research infrastructures and approaches is developing new areas of research in these communities, including the performing arts and humanities research. The arts and humanities are facing a similar situation that has led in the sciences to the establishment of national e-infrastructures for research. There is a data deluge in the humanities, resulting from two complementary developments. Firstly, analogue data is being transformed into digitised form; the Google Books project is just one high-profile example. Secondly, contemporary history is increasingly recorded digitally, posing a huge data challenges for researchers of the human condition. This workshop will investigate how e-Research can provide answers to enable digital research in the humanities.

With the workshop, we would like to promote discussion and to develop ideas that will extend the community employing e-Research infrastructures, services, technologies and methodologies in the arts, humanities and cultural heritage. We welcome anybody interested in this agenda, researchers, tool developers, and anybody interested in arts and humanities e-Research.

Structure of Workshop

The structure of the workshop will be as follows:

• Introduction by the organisers, setting out the context and expressing the aims and principles of the workshop.
• Keynote presentations by invited experts from both Australasia and the UK.
• Peer-reviewed contributions from researchers and practitioners (see Call below).
• Panel discussion. A selection of the workshop participants will be invited to join a panel to initiate broader discussion: to address issues raised during the workshop; to identify problems and potential solutions; to identify potential synergies between activities in Australasia and the UK; to contribute towards a roadmap for future research

Call for Contributions

We invite contributions concerning (but not limited to) the following topics relevant to e-Research in an arts, humanities and cultural heritage context:

• cyber-infrastructures for research
• digital repositories, digital libraries, and digital archives in research
• collaboration techniques for geographically distributed research; architectures of participation
• data management and digital curation in research infrastructures
• integration of diverse media types
• interoperability
• computational modelling
• knowledge management, including ontology development
• discovery and analysis methods: text-mining, visualisation, etc.
• use of e-Research tools and methodologies in practice-led research
• user interfaces supporting e-Research
• e-Research education and training
• impact of e-Research on the research life cycle; workflows supporting e-Research
• provenance in e-Research

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by at least three members of an independent, international programme committee before acceptance. Presentations submitted as part of the workshop should report original research that has not been published elsewhere, and at least one author of each accepted submission must attend the workshop.

We invite two types of contribution, as for the main conference: papers (which will be considered for publication in the conference proceedings) and presentations.

To submit a paper or presentation, please use the author submission form at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=era2008ahchworkshop.   The dates are as follows.  Other guidelines are as for the main conference.

• Call for Contributions: 1st June 2008
• Deadline for Submission (abstracts and/or papers) 15th July 2008
• Notification of Acceptance 15th August 2008
• Final submission of camera-ready papers 12th September 2008