The Social and Cultural Informatics Platform helps humanities and social science researchers to digitally capture and manage data, and curate and build digital resources and collections.
The platform helps researchers develop cost-effective digital research methods in the areas of humanities, social sciences, visual arts, and performing arts.
Our data scientists offer consultations, workshops and a guide to tools and methods for digital research. We will also partner on research projects.
Our services include:
- Project and grant planning, and budgeting support, especially in technology, data management, informatics and research software
- Capturing and curating data, for example social media, online datasets and application programming interfaces
- Research data management
- Building online resources and collections
- Data analytics and informatics
- Data wrangling, visualisation and presenting outcomes
- Advocating for and building data curation services for long-term access to research data.
We have collaborated on a wide range of projects, including:
- Science Gallery’s Blood exhibition where we mapped the word for ‘blood’ in more than 200 Australian Indigenous languages
- Digitising Melbourne's History Books: Sands & McDougall Directories supporting work on the Encyclopedia of Melbourne
- Representing Family Lives on Instagram capturing, analysing and storing Instagram posts.
Resources
Research methodology
survey and quantitative methods. computational social science methods, digital humanities methods, mixed methods
Data analysis
Data management and storage, data wrangling, data visualisation (e.g., interactive mapping, geocoding, animations, virtual reality), statistical modelling, text mining (e.g. semantic analysis and topic modelling), geospatial analysis; webscraping and digital data extraction methods including social media and APIs, static and temporal social network analysis, agent-based modelling, computational linguistics and natural language processing
Collaborations
Grant planning and support, consultations and face-to-face support, training workshops on statistical tools and methodology
Software support
R; Python, Stata, Tableau, NVivo, Latex, Omeka, Orange3.
User information
We provide up to ten hours free advice and support per year to University researchers. We also support unfunded research projects that align with the University’s digital research priorities free-of-charge.
Funded projects and external research projects are on a fee-for-service basis.
Contact us
Further information can also be found on the Research Gateway, which is available to all University of Melbourne academic and honorary staff, graduate researchers and professional staff. Please note, to access the Research Gateway, you will need to login with your University of Melbourne username and password.
- Nick Thieberger
- scip-enquiries@unimelb.edu.au
- Phone
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