Research

Four broad areas of inter-disciplinary research have been identified as already having relevant projects and work, in some cases substantial, relevant to the interests of the Research Group in Digital Humanities. The role of the Research Group will be to initiate research, engage with current work, offer support where this is appropriate, facilitate the involvement of new research partners, and ensure that the research is known and understood widely across the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and beyond.

Art, Media and Design

There is already a great deal of digital work in this area in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, and a formally constituted Media and Design group. Current work includes links with the Stalker Theatre Company, Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, the Australian Network for Art and Technology, and the National Institute for Experimental Arts at UNSW.

Work in the Writing and Society Research Centre is also highly relevant, including the ARC-funded project Creative Nation: Writers and Writing in the New Media Culture, and the soundsRite project generating verbal sounds and performances from computational models.

Cultural Histories

The main locus of current work is the School of Humanities and Communication Arts.  Major projects include Journey to Horseshoe Bend, and French Book Trade in the Enlightenment.

The role of the Research Group in Digital Humanities in areas where the major activity is in its home School will be to support this work and provide a framework for new initiatives, new collaborations and proposals for new research projects and funding. 

Digital Sciences

This will draw on the work being done primarily in Computing and in the MARCS Institute. Relevant research in Computing includes: virtual worlds and participatory engagement, ‘big data’ analysis and visualisation, the impact of the digital in developing economies and societies, health informatics and health services in Greater Western Sydney. 

The MARCS Institute hosts a substantial body of multi-disciplinary research, including: new approaches to human-machine interaction, with the proposed Human Communication Science Virtual Lab (HCS vLab) offering several points of contact, new research environments for the arts, e.g. The Thinking Head Project, cognition in art and performance, music improvisation, conversational dynamics and acquisition of language, and speech corpora and corpus analytics, involving the audio-visual corpus of Australian English, AusTalk.

Culture and Society

The focus in this area of research will be the Institute for Culture and Society, including the many School-based members of the Institute from the School of Humanities and Communication Arts. As well as the research of many individuals, there are also several large projects, including those on Global Logistics, Journey to Horseshoe Bend, Cultural Memory, and the Cooperative Research Centre Youth, Technology and Well-being.

A further focus will be the Urban Design Centre, where there is much relevant work including methods of analysis of large data sets, simulation of complex social systems, such as urban neighbourhoods and market networks for the distribution of food, and a wide range of visualisation and analysis methods using Geographical Information Systems (GIS).

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