The project is now in ‘technical scoping stage’. We have now hired a Data Manager, Ms Jo Croucher, who will be designing and running the integration of new data sets into the DAAO. We have also hired a very capable administrative officer, Ms Ran He, who now rounds out our team.

Jo and I spent last week in Melbourne meeting with our partners at Melbourne University and RMIT as well as various software developers, data managers, and as an added bonus, we also had a very productive meeting with the National Gallery Victoria. An exhausting but exciting week. 

With the help of our Melbourne Project Officer, Emily Wubben, we are now are now well into scoping the technical details of our arrangements with Melbourne University Cultural collections and have also begun planning the complex but extremely rewarding task of exposing the RMIT Design Archive content online and into the DAAO. RMIT Librarian, Craig Anderson is very generously allowing DAAO to second a librarian to help us organise the workflows- librarians, we’d be lost without them.

We have also begun working with CI Paul Thomas on ingesting content on the Perth Biennale of Electronic Art (BEAP) that Paul has been maintaining over the past decade. We are continuing and further developing our data exchange relationships with  ‘Australian Video Arts since the 1960s’ and ‘The Australian Media Art History Archive’- projects that Lead CI, Ross Harley is developing in partnership with national and international researchers.

Finally, DAAO was part of a major cultural data sets consortium (including AusStage, AusLit, ADB and others, and led by CI Deb Verhoeven (Deakin)) that was successful in receiving NeCTAR funds to develop a virtual laboratory. This is first humanities project to be involved in these generally STEM focussed projects. Quite a coup!  I have posted on it on this blogs “news and updates”.

I have also posted a rough map of our Project Outline so you can get a sense of the major tasks being undertaken in this grant cycle. As we progress through the project, this map will evolve.