eResearch Australasia 2009

Its conference season here in Australia once again. Now in beautiful Manley, Sydney for the eResearch Australasia 2009 conference, 10–12 Nov.

This year's theme is No Boundaries. What challenges are raised by a world with no boundaries? What potential can we unlock?

The conference features speakers and demonstrations from the Australian and international eResearch community, aiming to provide:

• A catalyst for innovation and collaboration, by bringing together researchers, practitioners, and educators from diverse disciplines;
• A forum to support the development, enhancement, and harmonisation of national, regional, and discipline-specific eResearch infrastructures and services;
• A showcase for innovative science and research enabled through these technologies and services.

Here's a few snapshots of this:

What's all this got to do with music and the arts?

Well, interestingly the 'humanities' sessions are some of the most widely attended, with a range of interesting presentations about this work on line, and particularly in relation to understanding new digital data sets captured and modelled accordingly, then to the new kinds of research questions and projects that arise. A range of these with abstracts and contact info can be found on the conference program, here.

For example, here's one interesting project about the performing arts from AusStage – an accessible research facility for investigating live performance in Australia. It was built by a consortium of universities and industry partners with funding from the Australian Research Council.

AusStage and the Aus-e-Stage Project: Collaborative eResearch in the Performing Arts. This session presented researchers demonstrating innovations in performing arts eResearch, new research applications for the AusStage database and raised questions about the implications of visual interface design and collective approaches to data curation for research in the performing arts.

Elsewhere, there have been a range of sessions about training Research Higher Degree students, increasingly interested as they now are in using the web for their own variants of e-research, and increasingly wishing to model different kinds of modelling, and different kinds of exegesis (including interactive, web-based and the like). Here's a few related presentations:

eResearch Training for Higher Degree Students (University of Melbourne)
eResearch practices, barriers and needs for support: Preliminary study findings from four NSW universities.
eResearch Education and Training.