Bootstrapping digital humanities support services for small teams

Bootstrapping digital humanities support services for small teams

This paper is about another paper; the story of its creation, publishing and deposit in an institutional repository, the story of the research data that informed it and some speculation about the preservation and further dissemination of both paper and data. The article in question was written by members of the Education Theory Collective (ETC) in the Centre for Research in Transformative Pedagogies (CRTP): Austin, Jon and Hickey, Andrew (2008) Signing the school in neoliberal times: the public pedagogy of being pedagogically public. International Journal of Learning, 15 (1). pp. 193-202. ISSN 1447-9494. <http://eprints.usq.edu.au/4240/>

We look at how the data for the article, which consisted of digital images and text transcripts of public signs were collected and managed, and the challenges that will be faced in archiving them. Published images were partially obscured to protect the identity of the schools involved, presenting an interesting data-archiving problem in which original and obscured images will need to be preserved. We also explore how metadata could be kept with the image files, and how text transcripts and the taxonomy developed by the researchers might be indexed to allow discovery. We also consider how the data set might be deposited into an as-yet non existent part of the institutional repository optimised for image sets.

We consider the authoring process used, the relationship between the text of the article and the data, and its submission, publication, deposit in a repository. As with the images in the paper, we consider its prospects for the future.

Within this general context we also explore some alternative ways of dealing with the image metadata used in the research, with a demonstration of how the data might be deposited in a repository and then disseminated on the web.

This paper proposes a number of much-needed projects to put in place infrastructure for humanities researchers dealing with digital data, which are particularly timely in Australia as the new Australian National Data Service and related activities begin to roll out in mid 2008.