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.

QCRC videos

Here's a nice little widget from vimeo, for all of our Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre (QCRC) videos.

A Glorious Dawn

A lovely piece from colorpulsemusic.com: A musical tribute to Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking: 'A Glorious Dawn - Cosmos remixed'. Almost all samples and footage are taken from Carl Sagan's Cosmos and Stephen Hawking's Universe series.

Lyrics:

[Sagan]
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch
You must first invent the universe

Space is filled with a network of wormholes
You might emerge somewhere else in space
Some when-else in time

The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day venture to the stars

A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way

The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature

I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this cosmos
In which we float like a mote of dust
In the morning sky

But the brain does much more than just recollect
It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes
it generates abstractions

The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning
The brain has it's own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world

[Hawking]
For thousands of years
People have wondered about the universe
Did it stretch out forever
Or was there a limit

From the big bang to black holes
From dark matter to a possible big crunch
Our image of the universe today
Is full of strange sounding ideas

[Sagan]
How lucky we are to live in this time
The first moment in human history
When we are in fact visiting other worlds

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we've waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting

The long drive to Melbourne & back

Just back from Melbourne, a 1700k driving trip either way from Brisbane (!). Beautiful weather, wonderful Saab 93 cabrio, and glorious country – some pictures from the trip are available on MobileMe.

The main reason for the long drive was to show our visitors from New York, Bill Duckworth and Nora Farrell around the country – especially the outback and some wonderful towns on the slow drive back to Brisbane, including Rutherglen, Katoomba and Bellingen.

In Melbourne, we stayed in the glorious Paramount Apartments overlooking the city.

Bill Duckworth gave lectures about his work at RMIT and at VCAM (Victorian College of the Arts & Music, UniMelb). Here's a video of his lecture from VCAM's cross media workshop (to VCAM's Mark Pollard – thanks so much for the hospitality!):



We also went to SIAL (RMIT's Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory) where Bill also delivered a lecture, but also got to tour their facilities with Lawrence Harvey. Of note was their wonderful studio 'pod', a purpose-built room-within-a-room that looks incredible:

Lawrence and Bill – inside The Pod.

Bill & Nora out front

Thanks to Lawrence, Bill, Nora, Jenny, Glyn, Margaret, John, Mark, Sue, Ian – and the Saab – for a great trip and wonderful memories of Melbourne and the Australian outback.