From May 21-23, Graham Jensen was in Melbourne to participate in the Australian Research Data Commons’ Digital Research Skills Summit. The event was held at the University of Melbourne and included participants from a wide range of digital research and training backgrounds.
The ARDC’s recap of the event provides great summaries of each day’s activities: from Day 1, the “ARDC Leadership Forum” (May 21); Day 2, “Building Community Around Research Infrastructure” (May 22); and Day 3, “Carpentry Connect,” which focused on the Carpentries program as an agile, distributed training network (May 23).
Given the INKE Partnership’s development of the HSS Commons and its related research as part of INKE’s “Connection” Cluster—not to mention the ETCL’s focus on training initiatives through the Digital Humanities Summer Institute—the Summit provided Graham with valuable opportunities to learn more about the ways that digital research infrastructure can inform community-engaged research and teaching in ways that enrich but also transcend national contexts, conventions, and scholarly networks (as our own Canadian-Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship aims to do). The ARDC has certainly helped shape our ongoing efforts in these directions. And on the theme of “connection,” the event served as a terrific occasion for Graham to learn from other organizations and researchers who are working towards shared goals, such as Wikimedia Australia and AARNet.
Indeed, from afar, ETCL and INKE members have been excited to watch the ARDC’s HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons grow, including through its “co-design” process (which Jenny Fewster and Kit Greenhill discussed during their presentation on Day 2 of the Summit). This kind of conscientious, inclusive, and community-led process is one that INKE has modelled in various ways over the years, but it’s also one that we will continue to embrace as we work towards forms of Canadian digital research infrastructure and open social scholarship that are responsive to the needs of our community.
Many thanks to Jenny, Kathyrn, Kit, and the rest of the ARDC team for the wonderful experience. Thanks also to Nic Geard and Daniel Russo-Batterham for the delightful introduction to, and tour of, the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform! We can’t wait to connect with, and learn from, all of our amazing partners and colleagues in Australia and New Zealand at our next CAPOS gathering (stay tuned for more details, which will be shared via the INKE Events page!).