The international AOIR has a great ongoing discussion about ethics of doing social media research, including 2012 recommendations for researchers and a wiki that you can contribute to. Check it out!

The HCS vLab is one of the Australian Government funded NeCTAR eResearch projects.

Human Communication Science (HCS) is a broad-reaching interdisciplinary mix of research that spans speech, language, sonics and music; and HCS research encompasses areas such as speech science, computer science, behavioural science, linguistics, music cognition and musicology, and sonics and acoustics.

The virtual lab:

• Brings together diverse data sets for the first time into one discovery/repository system, including text, audio and video resources with rich metadata.
• Links the data to tools – both inside and outside the lab, from simple bread-and-butter linguistic tools like concordance (keyword-in-context) searching and word frequency analysis to processing data using programming languages such as Python and R.
• Has a workflow system we borrow from the the bioinformatics community – Galaxy, where users will be able to chain-together complex processing pipelines on data.

Who might be interested? Anyone interested in text, audio, video processing of any kind will eventually have access to the vLab or be able to run their own version of it.

We’re proposing to give a demo and talk about how it might be useful to all kinds of digital humanities researchers, and seek suggestions about tools you might like to use in the future Forensic Literary analysis? OCR on pictures of graffiti? Tell us!

See more, including video demos at hcsvlab.org.au/.

OR – we could link up with other NeCTAR tools/labs at THAT Camp and do a joint session comparing our approaches.

Peter Sefton, Dominique Estival and Denis Burnham – University of Western Sydney

Data wranglers, back in the day, were spreadsheet wizards who could make any data sing to the tune of any report.  Today we have data mashups magicians who can take data streamed from several places across the globe push them into Google gadgets displayed on any web page. They way we consume data today will undoubtedly change tomorrow.  I have spent the last 5 years working with technology for a variety of humanities projects with a wide range of concepts, data modeling needs and data import requirements.

I would like to talk with researchers about their experience with data evolution throughout their research careers and the processes used to migrate data throughout the years.  I hope that we get the opportunity to discuss approaches to evolving data across the decades, how to separate data models from work flows and why standards don’t last.

Some excellent proposals – including this one and this one – have been posted so far. Why not add yours or pitch it live in

Time to post your session proposals for THATCamp Sydney 2013 by logging in. Draw inspiration from reading the proposals already posted on the home page and reading the tips and suggestions.

Announcing THATCamp Sydney 2013!

Day 1: 30th October 9:30am – 4:30pm | Day 2: 31st October 9:00am – 12:45pm

Location: State Library of NSW

The State Library of NSW and Intersect Australia are proud to present THATCamp Sydney 2013 over two big days in October.

As noted on thatcamp.org:

“THATCamp stands for ‘The Humanities and Technology Camp.’ It is an unconference: an open, inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.”

This is the first time (to our knowledge) a THATCamp has been held in Sydney, which makes this event especially exciting. If you’ve never attended a THATCamp before, you can get a good idea of what goes on at them by looking the websites of previous THATCamps in Melbourne, Canberra and Brisbane (to list but a few) and the thatcamp.org website (which lists hundreds of THATCamps that have and will happen all around the world).

If you’re passionate about the humanities, technology or operate at the nexus, the digital humanities, then this unconference is for you. Places are strictly limited, allocated on a first-come-first-served based, and will go fast, so please register now.

Please visit this site regularly or follow us on Twitter @THATCampSYD to stay up to date in the lead up to THATCamp Sydney 2013.