 | LDaCA Newsletter — Quarter 1 2024 |
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| News | New LinkedIn page | LDaCA is now on LinkedIn! We look forward to sharing more content about the project and connecting with the wider community. Follow our page or send us a message here. | Website update | Our website has a new look and has been reorganised. We hope that you like the design changes and that information is now easier to find. We encourage feedback via email or LinkedIn so that we can continue to make the website more useful. | Online policy documents and advice |
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Several documents outlining LDaCA policies and providing advice for data custodians are now available on the LDaCA website under Resources, then LDaCA Resources. The key policy document details our Access Policy; this policy document is supported by a guide to Determining Access Conditions. There is also a document explaining the LDaCA Data Onboarding Process, supported by Guidance for Data Governance Decisions and a guide to Obtaining a DOI. These documents are the outcome of wonderful work by project members at the Australian National University: Catherine Travis, Li Nguyen and Cale Johnstone. Rosanna Smith (LDaCA User Design Analyst) prepared the material for online publication. | 2024 Graduate Digital Research Fellowship Program | In the last five years, the University of Queensland (UQ) has hosted several iterations of a Graduate Digital Research Fellowship program focused on researchers in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS). In 2023, the program ran under the auspices of ATAP. Two members of our UQ team, Sam Hames (Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Computational Humanities) and Simon Musgrave (Engagement Lead for ATAP and LDaCA), led the program and four students participated. You can read more about the history of the program and the 2023 cohort in this blog post. |  | | The program will run again in 2024 as an LDaCA activity, supporting research students to explore the possibilities of digital scholarship, particularly in HASS. Our Fellows are students undertaking extended research projects who spend 12–15 weeks learning about digital and computational skills in order to enhance their current research topic or to work on an independent digital project. They explore digital research methods in areas including, but not limited to: computational analysis of text creation of new software tools to support their specific research area social media analytics assessment and analysis of digital environments including mobile apps online games as social and cultural objects.
The Fellows meet regularly in activities to develop a sound understanding of digital research methods and tools, including seminars, reading groups and training workshops. They also have access to mentors who advise and collaborate on their digital projects.
Expressions of interest (EOIs) are sought from research students based in South East Queensland who would like to participate in the 2024 program; EOIs can be submitted using a Google form and are due by 19 February 2024. If you are interested and have questions about the program, please contact Simon (s.musgrave@uq.edu.au) or Sam (sam.hames@uq.edu.au).
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New team member | We had a new team member, Teresa Chan, join us at the start of this year. Here is her brief introduction:
Hi, my name is Teresa Chan and I’ve joined the LDaCA team as a Communications Officer, based in Sydney on Dharug/Darug Country. My specialty is applied linguistics, most recently managing language data technology projects in the artificial intelligence and machine learning space. I’m looking forward to raising the profile of LDaCA and showcasing the important work being done to provide appropriate, continued access to language data collections, particularly for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Pacific languages. | | Events | Upcoming Events | HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons Computational Skills Summer School 2024 | When: 7–9 February 2024, 8:00am to 3:30pm (AEST), 9:00am to 4:30pm (AEDT) Where: Naarm/Melbourne Run by: ARDC
HDR, EMCR, Indigenous and HASS researchers as well as managers of Indigenous data are invited to a free Computational Skills Summer School. At this 3-day, face-to-face event, you will gain useful digital skills for HASS and Indigenous research in an interactive group setting and network with researchers in your field.
Session highlights include: data governance and management, with a focus on Indigenous data integrating social and geospatial data finding and analysing GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) data.
For more information and to register, see the registration page here. | Co-design workshops for LDaCA | When: Day 1: 22 February 2024, 1:00pm to 3:00pm (AEST), 2:00pm to 4:00pm (AEDT) Day 2: 7 March 2024, 12:00pm to 2:00pm (AEST), 1:00pm to 3:00pm (AEDT)
Where: Online Run by: ARDC
The ARDC invites the research community to join two workshops to co-design a national research infrastructure program that will support LDaCA. Through the co-design workshops, the ARDC aims to better understand the current digital research challenges faced by researchers and managers of Indigenous data. The workshops will enable the research community to discuss the investment opportunities that ARDC has identified, with the aim of learning: what outcomes and developments would be of most benefit what will be both valuable and feasible how our investments can align with other activity in the sector.
Who should participate:
HASS and Indigenous research community, including academics, researchers and citizen scientists, particularly those involved in data-driven research managers of Indigenous data senior decision makers at research, GLAM and Indigenous institutions, industry and NGOs (non-governmental organisations) those who collect and manage data for use by research research infrastructure providers and digital skills trainers.
For more information and to register, see the registration page here. |
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Recent Events | ALS 2023 | LDaCA team members had a busy and exciting time at the 2023 annual ALS conference, hosted by The University of Sydney (USyd) on Gadigal land (29 Nov–1 Dec), leading several activities which prompted lively and insightful discussion.
On the first day, Peter Sefton, Simon Musgrave and Li Nguyen ran a well-attended workshop titled “Language Data Management in the 21st Century”, which considered questions such as what good data outcomes for language data research might look like and practical requirements for data sustainability.
On the final day, Robert McLellan and Simon convened a themed session looking at Indigenous language collections in LDaCA. In this session, Robert presented on “CAREful FAIRness and principles for Indigenous Data Governance” and Karen Manton from the Batchelor Institute presented on the ways LDaCA and the institute are working together to backup and reformat the metadata from the Centre for Australian Language and Linguistics collection while also embedding cultural protocols to ensure appropriate long-term access. You can find a complete list of talks from this session along with abstracts here.
|  | | Catherine Travis concluded with a lunchtime information session on how LDaCA can be a resource for digital linguistic research, with demos of the LDaCA data portal and the Juxtorpus Jupyter notebook developed by project partners at the Sydney Informatics Hub.
Thanks to those who attended for such robust and engaging discussion and feedback during all LDaCA sessions! |
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| Workshop on community language corpora in Australia | Li Nguyen and Catherine Travis convened a workshop on community language corpora in Australia (Canberra, Ngambri and Ngunnawal Country, 9–10 Nov). The participants enjoyed two days of stimulating presentations (including ones by LDaCA team members Li, Catherine and Simon Musgrave) and contributed to the important discussions which followed. The program and abstracts can be found here. This is the second workshop on language corpora in Australia that Li and Catherine organised in 2023. You can access the program and the abstracts for the first workshop here. | 2023 Vocabulary Symposium: FAIR Vocabularies for All | Simon Musgrave and Peter Sefton attended the 2023 Vocabulary Symposium with the theme “FAIR Vocabularies for All” (Canberra, Ngambri and Ngunnawal Country, and online, 14–15 Nov). A summary of the event and video recordings can be found on the ARDC website here. A recording of Simon’s talk (“Using GitBook for user-friendly documentation of a vocabulary”) can be viewed here and a copy of the abstract and slides can be accessed here. The abstract and slides for Peter’s talk (“Building domain specific vocabularies for packaging and archiving research and cultural data”) can be accessed here. | Text analytics webinar series | Monika Bednarek gave a seminar called “New Tools for Corpus Linguistics” (online, 9 Oct) in a text analytics webinar series jointly hosted by the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences at Lancaster University and Sydney Corpus Lab at USyd. You can watch a recording and access a transcript here. | | Corpus Spotlight: Corpus of Australian and New Zealand Spoken English (CoANZSE) | The Corpus of Australian and New Zealand Spoken English (CoANZSE) is a recent 196-million-word corpus of speech transcripts from Australia and New Zealand, including annotation, audio and forced alignment files.
Steven Coats (University of Oulu, Finland) created the corpus from 55,896 Automatic Speech Recognition transcripts from 478 YouTube channels of local councils and other governmental entities across all primary regions and territories of Australia and New Zealand. Annotation includes part-of-speech tagging and individual word timings. Exact latitude-longitude coordinates for the council authorities are also provided in the metadata, supporting geographical analysis of language data.
All the corpus material is scraped from YouTube channels associated with local government entities and is therefore in the public domain. This includes recordings of council meetings, but also interviews, informational and public service videos, vlogs, public readings and other content types.
CoANZSE will likely interest digital humanities and social science researchers in the fields of linguistics and language, communication, cultural studies, geography, political science, sociology, urban studies and planning, government and international relations and public and social policy, among others. You can read more about the corpus, including preliminary results from two exploratory analyses, in this conference paper.
The corpus is freely available for research and education purposes. Transcripts can be found at the Harvard Dataverse here. The CoANZSE Audio v0.2 website offers a searchable online version of the corpus, including audio files and forced alignments in Praat's TextGrid format, by logging in via a CLARIN/eduGAIN-affiliated service provider or a CLARIN account.
Contact Steven Coats at steven.coats@oulu.fi or see the CoANZSE website for more information.
| | Team Member’s Tip | Sue Plunkett-Cole (SPC) is the Project Coordinator on the LDaCA team. SPC came to the project in February 2023 after working in the university and research sector in Sydney and Brisbane. She particularly enjoys the camaraderie of the project and the shared enthusiasm for the LDaCA goals.
SPC loves data and OPPs (other people’s pets) plus her cat Nina. She accepts bribery in the form of photos of your pets (or anyone’s really).
Sue’s tips: Have fun at work. If you use Excel and don’t yet use pivot tables, do it now, they are the best! See Pivot Tables Make Everything Just Right & Learn Pivot Tables in 6 Minutes (Microsoft Excel) Occasionally morph yourself into an animal on Zoom 😃
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|  |  | Images: Sue Plunkett-Cole |
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No Office Hours | The Joint Office Hour run by LDaCA and the Australian Digital Observatory will not take place in 2024. The teams from the two projects are working towards an alternative way to provide targeted advice to researchers — watch this space! |
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| We welcome any feedback to make future issues more useful for you. If the newsletter was forwarded to you, you can subscribe here. | | |
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LDaCA acknowledges Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respects to their Ancestors and their descendants, who continue cultural and spiritual connections to Country.
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Republishing is encouraged — CC BY text and infographics. If you have questions about republishing, please contact ldaca@uq.edu.au ©LDaCA — 2024 | | |
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