The speech celebrated a 20-year struggle, led by the Academy, that has finally secured (some) funding for humanities and Indigenous research infrastructure. It’s a broad-brush account, not a definitive record. We welcome comments and additions. Above all, it’s a rallying call. We now have a national platform. What’s past is prologue.
You can watch a recording of the speech here [at approximately 00:18:00].
18 June 2024
I wish to acknowledge we’re meeting on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, and I would also like to pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging. I extend that respect to all Indigenous colleagues who are here today.
Thank you Jenny (Fewster) and the HASS and Indigenous RDC for the opportunity to set the scene this morning, to present the milestones in the development of national humanities research infrastructure.
This has been a major priority for the Academy of the Humanities for a long time.
Many of you will know my friend and colleague in the Academy Secretariat, Dr Kylie Brass, “our legend in residence” for HASS research infrastructure, and our former long serving Executive Director Dr Tina Parolin.
These two, and before them Dr John Byron, worked with many Fellows of the Academy over more than 20 years to get us to where we are today.
Well, Kylie is on leave. John and Tina have moved on.
I’ve been Executive Director for five minutes. I don’t have a doctorate. But one thing I bring to this event is enormous respect for what has been achieved to date, and a determination to build on the progress we’ve collectively made.
Since 2003, the Academy has written over 100,000 words in submissions and reports on the need for HASS Research Infrastructure.
Looking back, for much of that journey, the despair was palpable. We made the case for HASS & Indigenous Research infrastructure again and again, seemingly falling on deaf ears, and closed wallets.
When you are prosecuting a long-term argument, it can feel like change is moving like molasses. It’s hard to see the forest for the trees.
So at this juncture, some 20 years since the introduction of NCRIS, it’s enlightening to look back, and take a moment to acknowledge just how far we’ve come, how fast the technology has moved-on, and also to renew our collective intent to address unfinished business.
We begin this speech in the deep past, as far as research data infrastructure is concerned.
It’s 2003. There are no smartphones. No social media.
We are in the BT era, Before Trove, the love child of National Library of Australia staff, launched in 2009.
The closest thing we have to an aggregator of HASS data is the Australian Libraries’ Bibliographic Network – and that’s metadata only.
Brendan Nelson is in his first year as Minister for Education. He has taken a personal interest in high-level consultations on research, including research infrastructure.
The fundamental rationale for nation-scale infrastructure spending was:
‘To maximise return from investment in research, Australia must provide researchers with access to modern and relevant research infrastructure.’
Humanities researchers and advocates could see that digitisation and digital infrastructures would be essential for the growth and impact of their disciplines, which comprised some 40 per cent of Australia’s research effort.
It would be foolish, we said, for Government to ignore almost half of the research system, for which affordable investments in digitisation and analytical tools would be transformative.
In developing NCRIS, we pressed the case that Government needed to support HASS disciplines to join the digital revolution.
But we knew we were up against it.
We noted the Terms of Reference for the review of the NCRIS process had a distinct orientation towards the funding of Science, Engineering and Technology.
The Committee that was charged with developing the NCRIS Strategic Roadmap was set the objective of ‘research for economic development, national security, social wellbeing, and environmental sustainability’.
Just to repeat: social wellbeing was one quarter of the NCRIS Committee’s remit.
In 2006, the first NCRIS Strategic Roadmap was published, under a new Education Minister, Julie Bishop.
Still no smartphones, still no social media. Still in digital pre-history. But very significant investments in digital research infrastructure were about to flow.
Devastatingly, of the 15 research investments the NCRIS Committee proposed, none were in the humanities and social sciences. The closest they came was counterterrorism.
The report authors decided that HASS was best served by generic, system-wide investments; in other words, the internet.
If you’ll indulge me in a rugby metaphor, the Committee had palmed the humanities off, and left us face down in the dirt.
It was only the sciences and technology who ran onto the infrastructure playing field, with money to spend.
At the Academy of the Humanities, we brushed ourselves off, and kept doing our job: consulting stakeholders, crystallising humanities’ needs, and doing what Academy scholars do best. The Academy published.
The Turner report, by former President Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner, proposed a national digital scholarly archive for humanities researchers in Australia. It would ‘provide public as well as academic access to key components of the nation’s social and cultural history’. It would be ‘a nation-building resource’.
In the Academy’s submission to the 2008 Roadmap, we argued that
‘In view of the 5 years of neglect, a special effort is warranted on the part of the NCRIS committee…
‘The HASS field is a large and complex part of national research enterprise, and NCRIS is very new to it. [in other words, they had no HASS experts on the committees]
‘Many of the previous errors were perpetuated because [of] fundamental misunderstandings about what HASS research is and how it is conducted.’
We said that research infrastructure investments must:
- ‘support the range of research activity actually undertaken through publicly funded research programmes’; ie there needed to be a platform for ‘Social and Cultural Knowledge’,
- NCRIS needed staff with HASS expertise;
- and it should fund training to bring more HASS researchers up to speed with the digital transformation.
And there was some progress.
The 2008 Strategic Roadmap reflected our advice that,
‘in the United States and Europe … major infrastructure investments in the social and cultural research sector have been made in the past five years’.
This second roadmap scoped but did not fund a HASS-specific eResearch Infrastructure.
So the year 2008 marks the humanities’ entrance into the Government’s national infrastructure agenda as a funding focus in its own right.
But still without any funding.
The Government’s next Research Infrastructure Roadmap was due in 2011.
The Academy sought Government assistance to support an orderly, prioritised digitisation effort.
You can hear the bitter fruit of experience in our phrase that there was ‘a bottomless pit of analogue material that still needed to be digitised’.
We insisted that the best way forward was a partnership between the Government and the HASS research community.
We drew attention to Margaret Sheil’s argument, in The Australian in 2011.
Margaret warned that ‘the lack of investment in Australia into HASS research infrastructure’ [is] having ‘a cumulative effect in further disadvantaging these fields of research’.
That lack of investment was ‘distancing Australia’s humanities community from opportunities for building ambitious collaborative projects’.
In our submissions to the Government, the Academy had progressed from the 2008 list of non-electronic resources for digitisation, to a 2011 list of ‘exemplary resources’.
These resources still comprise a large part of the headline humanities digital infrastructures.
They have been our spearheads.
Or maybe the better analogy is our door jambs: they are what we’ve used to prise open the door, to get into the room, to sit at the table, and to get funded for the information age.
Let’s jump to 2015. The contemporary era. Everyone has a smart phone. Social media is making life hell for parents, but at least they get to unwind streaming some excellent TV series.
Christopher Pyne is Minister for Education and Training.
He commissions the 2015 Clark review of research infrastructure. The review team includes the current Chief Scientist Professor Ian Chubb, and the future Chief Scientist Professor Alan Finkel.
The Clark review highlights the ‘irreplaceable’ scientific collections curated by CSIRO and other institutions, and notes their ‘permanent supranational value’.
The Review Panel does not discern existing national level research infrastructure in the HASS disciplines, and does not discuss equivalent cultural, humanities and social sciences collections.
But it does draw the reader’s attention to relevant examples such as the premier Australian Indigenous languages and cultural collection held by AIATSIS, the Australian English collection, and PARADISEC.
The Clark Review notes, in some cases these collections are more widely dispersed than the scientific collections AND that the management of HASS collections is becoming increasingly national through eResearch tools such as NeCTAR.
The Review Panel knows it should be thinking about society and culture, but they have other things on their minds.
After an intense international campaign, Australia has won the right to co-host the SKA – the Square Kilometre Array of radio telescopes.
Now Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel introduces the 2016 NCRIS Roadmap by invoking Galileo.
Now, old Galilei ground his own lenses and assembled his own little telescope and changed the world.
But in 2016, Alan writes, 15 of the world’s leading research nations are collaborating to build the SKA.
It is a multinational effort to listen to the beginning of all things, the ‘Cosmic Dawn’.
How can the humanities compete with this? Where is our telescope analogy?
Galileo was certainly influenced by the philosophers and artists of renaissance Italy. His father was a musicologist.
But in Australia in 2016, where is the acknowledgement that science – it should not need saying – is a human endeavour, that benefits from humanities disciplines?
There is a glimmer of light.
It seems the 2016 NCRIS will, after all, recommend funding the humanities. Finally.
The 2016 Roadmap said that NCRIS should include ‘Platforms for Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences’.
Following the release of the 2016 Roadmap in March 2017, the Academy of the Humanities works with colleagues at ASSA, in the GLAM sector, and researchers to scope infrastructure ‘Platforms for HASS’.
We convened data summits for Humanities and Culture in 2018 and 2019, sponsored by AARNET and held at NFSA and the NLA.
These summits were our first major push at Collective Action, in fact, they were the first time representatives from across HASS and GLAM sectors had come together to workshop National Research Infrastructure.
It was agreed that Humanities and Cultural research was at a ‘pivotal juncture’.
Changes in digital technology, ‘big data’ were transforming research practice in the humanities and arts.
But the threshold problem lay in “the lack of an agreed approach to research infrastructure investment for humanities, arts and culture”.
The Academy’s position was:
- A national strategic plan, to expand the development of innovative research infrastructure, and
- A large, collaborative, interconnected ‘facility’ for humanities, arts and culture with a broad national remit.
Several research infrastructure platforms were presented as case studies:
- PARADISEC– Australia’s digital archive for endangered languages all over the world, with 1149 languages (then) represented in the collection.
- Trove– the National Library of Australia’s much-loved research platform, the fourth most visited government website at around 60,000 visits a day.
- The Social, Cultural and Informatics Platform – bringing digital expertise and humanities, arts and social sciences knowledge together at the University of Melbourne.
Arising out of the summit was a shared appetite to work together on a collaborative agenda.
We canvassed future opportunities, including:
- Using research infrastructure to drive knowledge exchange in Australia and internationally
- Bringing together HASS and STEM expertise in a ‘Time Machine for Australia’ – which was conceived as a platform for deepening knowledge of 65,000 years of Australia’s human and environmental history
These summits were pivotal events.
They birthed the Time Layered Cultural Map in 2020.
They launched the Language Data Commons of Australia.
But we still had to contend with inertia in the NCRIS system.
The Government responded to the 2016 Roadmap in the second half of 2018.
It committed funding to an excellent social science platform, AURIN for urban research infrastructure, which would get $7 million.
But the largest share of HASS expenditure, would not go to HASS platforms at all.
$43 million would go to the CSIRO to build a new building for its plant and insect collections.
And the Atlas of Living Australia, biology-based, would get a further $2 million.
By contrast, the humanities would receive a share of the funds allocated for scoping studies, in the order of $400,000.
So of the $112 million nominally allocated to HASS, for the period to 2029, the humanities could be confident of some portion of $400,000 – that’s less than half a per cent of the total.
But the funding door had been opened, just a crack: and now, thanks to the Humanities and Culture Data Summits, we had real momentum to mount the case for further investment.
The scoping studies into HASS research platforms were conducted by the ARDC and the Academy of the Humanities.
The Academy focussed on international comparators.
We completed detailed mapping of research infrastructures in Europe, the UK, the Netherlands, USA, Canada and New Zealand.
The report showed that HASS in Australia was in much the same position that leading European nations had been in, before EU stimulus seeded key HASS strengths.
We concluded that one of the highest priorities for Australian HASS national research infrastructure was the establishment of an entity to
- create focus
- clarify responsibility
- maximise collaboration
- and reduce complexity regarding HASS research infrastructures.
We now have that entity: the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons.
We are all here today to support it, to contribute to it.
In 2023, HASS and Indigenous RDC received the largest ever investment in HASS research infrastructure in Australia. We are now well into the co-design process for the expansion of HASS research infrastructure.
At this point I must acknowledge the enormous personal endeavours of HASS researchers over many years (some of whom are in the room today).
I’d also like to acknowledge, in the room today, Dr Jon Lane who was the chief architect of this speech. I thoroughly enjoyed being Jon’s research assistant throughout the course of the week, wading through the one-hundred thousand words of content to craft this speech.
I would also like to again underscore the integral role played by Dr Kylie Brass in the Academy’s secretariat, who has worked tirelessly, over 15 years, in building relationships, setting the vision, connecting the dots between policy and practice and cultivating the collective.
I also acknowledge the enormous efforts of the team at the ARDC, especially Jenny Fewster and the leadership team of Academy of Social Sciences Australia.
New champions for HASS research infrastructure are joining the movement, and the ARDC is making great strides in building researcher capacity as well as in supporting platform development.
Indigenous research data sovereignty has moved, rightly and at long last, to centre stage, both within our Academy, and in our national research infrastructure initiatives.
We really are just at the beginning of something that has so much to offer our disciplines, and through them, the nation.
‘Nation-scale humanities research data infrastructure’ – what a mouthful.
But what it boils down to is this.
Our ability not only to see further, but to bring human perspectives, in all their variety, to bear upon national issues, in all their complexity.
That’s how we can fulfil the mission of research for social benefit.
I look forward to working with you all, including through the ARDC, to that end.
Thank you very much.