|  | LDaCA Newsletter — Quarter 4 2024 |
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| Welcome to the final issue for 2024 of this newsletter about the activities of the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA) and the Australian Text Analytics Platform (ATAP). This quarter, we give a preview of Summer School 2025, celebrate PARADISEC’s international win and share some important team changes. If you have any questions or feedback, please email us at ldaca@uq.edu.au or message us on our LinkedIn page. |
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| | | Following the success of events in 2023 and this year, the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons (RDC) will run a Summer School again next year. The event will also be preceded by a masterclass on Indigenous Data Governance. LDaCA team members are involved in developing and delivering content as part of the program. |
| | 28 October 2024: Registrations open for Summer School and online preview. Travel bursary information made available. 25 November 2024, 2 pm to 3 pm AEDT: Online preview of Summer School topics and report from Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) Indigenous Intern Liam Jensen’s experience at the 2024 event. 3 February 2025 (venue TBA): Indigenous Data Governance masterclass. 4–6 February 2025 at The University of Queensland (UQ): Summer School 2025. |
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| Special Issue of the Australian Journal of Linguistics |
| The Australian Journal of Linguistics (AJL) has published a Special Issue featuring a curated collection of papers on language corpora in Australia, initially presented at a 2023 workshop supported by LDaCA. As Chief Investigator (CI) Catherine Travis (Australian National University (ANU)) and Li Nguyen (formerly an LDaCA team member) write in their introduction to the issue: “We hope that the corpus descriptions provided in this volume will help… [set] a precedent for a new kind of ‘data article’ for the Australian Journal of Linguistics, in which the data take the centre stage and data management practices are well documented.” In place of our regular Corpus Spotlight section, we recommend looking at one (or more) of these papers, for example, the description of the Yarning Corpus. |
| Book ‘Bina: First Nations Languages, Old and New’ |
| An important new book about First Nations languages has been published: ‘Bina: First Nations Languages, Old and New’ by Gari Tudor-Smith, Paul Williams and Felicity Meakins. Most previous works surveying the languages and language usage of Indigenous Australians have been directed at academic audiences and have rarely taken account of the perspectives of Indigenous peoples. ‘Bina’ takes a big step to fill the resulting gap, with two of its three authors being Indigenous and with the fascinating story of language in Australia told from an Indigenous point of view. The book has been enthusiastically reviewed, including in ‘The Saturday Paper’ and the ‘Tasmanian Times’. Paul Williams was a member of the LDaCA team at the UQ until recently. |
| Digital Preservation Awards 2024 |
| |  | Julia Colleen Miller accepting the Digital Preservation Award for Research and Innovation in Belgium. Image Source: Digital Preservation Coalition |
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| Australian Languages Workshop 2024 |
| Ben Foley (Data, Collections and Licencing Lead) and Bridey Lea (Industry Engagement and Communications Analyst) presented at the Australian Languages Workshop 2024 on 20–22 September in Canberra, co-hosted by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and ANU. Ben presented an overview of LDaCA's collaborations, and Bridey presented findings from interviews with Indigenous language practitioners who use archival materials. The workshop highlighted the diversity of Australian language work, from community-led data collection which informs evidence-based language programs to the application of archival materials in language revitalisation. |
|  | Bridey Lea presenting at the Australian Languages Workshop 2024 in Canberra. Image Source: Alex Ip |
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| | A blog post about the 2024 Graduate Digital Research Fellowship cohort, as co-ordinated by Sam Hames (Research Analytics Lead) and Simon Musgrave (Research Support and Training Lead). Our videos are now on a new YouTube channel. Several new glossary terms were added to our website. Two user guides are up on our website: one for our Data Portal and one for our RO-Crate editing tool, Crate-O.
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| | In addition to the special issue of AJL described above, there have been several publications released that feature, were authored or were co-authored by LDaCA team members: |
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| Two people have left the team in the last quarter: Otis Carmichael (formerly a Graphic Designer) and Paul Williams (formerly a Research Assistant). We wish them all the best in their new endeavours! Two people have also joined our team last month and their introductions are below. We’re also looking for someone with experience working with Indigenous communities, people, knowledge or data to provide research and technical support as Project Officer, Indigenous Languages. Apply here!
I’m Chenoa Pettrup, and I live on Yuggera and Turrbal Country in Brisbane. I have joined the LDaCA team after working at the State Library of Queensland for 11 years in a variety of roles from Strategic Engagement to Digital Library Initiatives. I’m looking forward to getting involved in a wide range of activities in the coming months as the Program Manager for the Industry Engagement and Communications focus area!
I’m Ruby Baird and I’ve just joined the LDaCA team as Senior Research Project Officer (Language Analytics). I am based in Sydney on Gadigal Country. I have a Master of Research in Linguistics and a professional background managing linguistic projects for language-based AI. I’m excited to be joining a project guided by strong ethical principles and to contribute to LDaCA’s work helping researchers do cool things with language data. |
| | | | | When: 18 October 2024, 12:30 pm – 2 pm AEDT Where: In person (Boardroom, Level 7, Melbourne Connect, 700 Swanston Street, Carlton) or Online Run by: Melbourne Data Analytics Platform (MDAP)
Simon Musgrave will be speaking about the LDaCA project at an MDAP seminar. Lunch is at 12:30 pm and the seminar begins at 1 pm. Registrations open. |
| eResearch Australasia 2024 |
| When: 28 October – 1 November 2024 Where: Pullman Albert Park, Melbourne Run by: Australasian eResearch Organisations
LDaCA team members will present at the 2024 eResearch Australasia Conference on (all times in AEDT): 29 October, 4:45 pm to 5:05 pm — ‘Cementing Cultures: Establishing an Indigenous Data Governance Framework for the ARDC HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons’ (Jenny Fewster, Levi Murray, Robert McLellan) 30 October, 1:25 pm to 1:45 pm — ‘Protocols for Implementing Long-term Archival Repositories Services (PILARS)’ (Moises Sacal Bonequi, Peter Sefton) 30 October, 3:55 pm to 4:15 pm — ‘Tools and workflows for metadata enrichment’ (Simon Musgrave, Rosanna Smith, Ben Foley, Jianyao (Aaron) Xu).
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| | When: 6–7 November 2024 Where: Australian Catholic University, Brisbane campus
We will be running some sessions on text analytics and LDaCA tools at ResBaz QLD. More details are forthcoming once the program is finalised. |
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When: 26–28 November 2024 Where: Learning and Teaching Building, Level G, Monash University, Clayton Run by: Monash e-Research Centre
ResBaz is returning to Victoria this year after a hiatus. Simon Musgrave will deliver a workshop on concordancing as a basic tool for analysing texts, and will also be part of a general session introducing the work of the HASS and Indigenous RDC. More details are forthcoming once the program is finalised. |
| | When: 26–29 November 2024 Where: ANU, Canberra Run by: The Australian Linguistic Society (ALS)
LDaCA team members will be well-represented at the ALS 2024 conference on (all times in AEDT): 27 November, 9 am to 9:30 am — ‘Language learning through song’ (CI Clint Bracknell (University of Western Australia) and colleagues) 28 November, 10:30 am to 11 am — ‘Into the archive and out again: repurposing Adam Kendon's Warlpiri sign language dictionary’ (Ben Foley and colleagues) 28 November, 11:30 am to 12 pm — ‘Variation and change in Australian English vowels: A view across the urban/regional divide’ (Catherine Travis and colleagues) 28 November, 12 pm to 12:30 pm — ‘Second language acquisition of sociolinguistic variation for changes in progress’ (Gan Qiao, Catherine Travis and a colleague) 28 November, 4 pm to 4:30 pm — ‘Simplifying this and that: demonstrative change in Kaytetye’ (Bridey Lea and colleagues) 28 November, 5:30 pm to 6 pm — ‘Unparliamentary language in Australian Federal Parliament’ (Michael Haugh, Sam Hames and Simon Musgrave) 29 November, 11:30 am to 12 pm — ‘Oral histories as a sociolinguistic resource’ (Catherine Travis, Gan Qiao and Anisa Puri).
The date and time for masterclass ‘Improving Transparency and Reproducible Results in Linguistics’ (CI Martin Schweinberger (UQ) and Sam Hames) is still to be confirmed. |
| | | Presentations given by LDaCA team members in external forums in the last quarter included: |
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| Data migration skills workshop |
| ANU hosted a data migration skills workshop on 3–5 September, involving most of the UQ team plus several others. We divided into four groups, who worked on: Learning basic skills for transforming data from spreadsheet to RO-Crate format (Mark Raadgever, Bridey Lea, Bethia Blond) Experimenting with templates for static websites (Moises Sacal Bonequi, Otis Carmichael, Wolfgang Barth) Linking data exported from LDaCA formats to tools (Sam Hames, Simon Musgrave, Rosanna Smith, Alvin Sebastian) Transforming data with geospatial information (Rose Barrowcliffe, Ben Foley, Alex Ip).
Peter Sefton (Principal Research Fellow) kept an eye on the various activities and contributed his expertise when needed. |
|  | Sitting: (l. to r.) Bethia Blond, Bridey Lea, Mark Raadgever.
Standing: (l. to r.) Moises Sacal Bonequi, Ben Foley, Gan Qiao. Image Source: Peter Sefton |
| | On 19 September, Simon Musgrave and Sam Hames led an introductory workshop ‘Using Hansard & Other Parliamentary Proceedings for Your Research’, hosted by the Computational Social Science Lab at USyd. The event was well-attended by students, professors, librarians and other staff from a diverse range of disciplines, including linguistics, history, law, education, media and communications and politics. The workshop covered the background to Hansard, short vignettes from Dr Adam Smith (Macquarie University) and Sam on how they used Hansard in their research, and introduced online text analysis tools from Voyant Tools, which groups of participants used to explore the proceedings from the 11th Federal Parliament. |
|  | Adam Smith (seated far l.), Simon Musgrave (standing l.) and Sam Hames (standing r.) at the Hansard workshop.
Image Source: The Computational Social Science Lab at USyd |
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| UQ Research & Innovation Week 2024 events |
| On 30 September, LDaCA hosted an event ‘Indigenous Data Governance: A discussion’. The panellists were CI Rose Barrowcliffe (UQ), Robert McLellan and Leslie Acres (UQ Library). Grant Sarra moderated the discussion which took place before an audience of around 40 people at the UQ Anthropology Museum. On 1 October, UQ involvement in the various streams of the HASS and Indigenous RDC was the focus of ‘Showcasing the UQ HASS and Indigenous Research Infrastructure Capabilities’, where Michael Haugh contributed an overview of the LDaCA project. |
|  | (l. to r.) Grant Sarra, Leslie Acres, Rose Barrowcliffe and Robert McLellan at the Indigenous Data Governance discussion.
Image Source: Lewis James Bin Doraho |
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| Pilot web data collection workshop |
| On 4 October, Sam Hames ran a pilot workshop on data collection approaches for the web, including using existing web archives, creating your own web archives and how to approach web scraping as a method. Organised by the Centre for Digital Cultures and Societies at the UQ, 12 attendees were introduced to the fundamentals of how the web works and how to start asking questions and choosing approaches to studying the web. |
| Joint introductory text analytics workshops |
| On 9 October, the first of a two-part online workshop series titled ‘A glamorous introduction to text analytics for social media’ was held, jointly co-hosted with the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Digital Observatory (DO). Robert Fleet (DO) introduced more than 40 participants to some basic concepts and tools, then demonstrated how to use a notebook to gather Reddit data using DO’s own API (AusReddit) and how to explore Reddit conversations using visualisations. In the second workshop on 16 October, Martin Schweinberger will teach participants how to apply a range of text analytic techniques to Reddit data, using the very sparkly example of the Eurovision Song Contest. Registrations still open. |
| | | Alex Ip is an eResearch infrastructure developer at Australia's Academic and Research Network (AARNet). A long-time IT professional and data generalist, he has been involved with a wide variety of scientific data and metadata, including livestock genetics, large-scale satellite imagery and geophysical survey data.
Alex is relatively new to the HASS scene, but keen to learn and be guided by experts. He is eager to explore the application of some of the approaches used for large-scale scientific data to linguistics, while remaining sensitive to the human aspects of the data.
Alex’s tip: Always be ready to learn. Watch, listen and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Watch how researchers interact, and how they find and share information. This can provide insights into what their data pain points are and how they might be addressed. Listen to the kinds of questions that researchers are trying to answer. Sometimes, researchers might not have thought of a particular angle of inquiry, but perhaps they already have. Don’t reinvent wheels. Ask questions, however “dumb” you think they might be. Sometimes, having researchers explain the details of their field to a novice can lead to innovative and exciting developments when that novice can bring fresh knowledge and perspectives to the table.
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|  | Alex Ip speaking about LDaCA at the eResearch Australasia 2023 Conference in Brisbane.
Image Source: Alex Ip |
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| | The Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education (Batchelor Institute) is Australia’s only First Nations dual sector tertiary education provider, that is, it delivers both vocational education and training and postgraduate higher education. It privileges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of learning and teaching, with a focus on serving people and communities. Previously, we collaborated with the Batchelor Institute Library in work on the Centre for Australian Languages and Linguistics (CALL) Collection, an archive of Indigenous language materials. We now welcome the Batchelor Institute as an official project partner under CI Kathryn Gilbey. |
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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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