Welcome to our research blog!

As the project gears up this space will be populated with project updates, discussions between researchers, developers, Design and Art Australia Online (DAAO) staff and other stakeholders.

We have one year to achieve our goal of transforming the Dictionary of Australian Artists Online into Design and Art Australia Online – an expanded, syndicated, database with enhanced content, search, and research functionality -a scalable and sustainable piece of research infrastructure that will help us better understand and document Australian art and design (phew!). So we will be moving quickly.

Shortly, you (our researchers and members of our partner organisations) will start getting a series of short questionnaires devised by our Business Analysis and User Interface Design consultants to probe how the new database would best service your research.

Sometimes we will make short instructional videos on issues such as data mining, syndication, visualisation and how to write an effective user scenario (don’t worry! they are short- usually only 3 sentences long – a type of haiku of use intention) to assist you in some of the questions we might ask.

Also as we transform the database, we want to document its history, so we will also be generating lots of documentation about what we were and where we are going. These videos and diagrams have the added bonus of leaving a little trail of learning and research objects that we are syndicating on our youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/DAAOAUS.

Feel free to post, comment, hashtag your twitter feeds #daao or feed your good delicious tags our way. Tag  ‘DAAO’ or ‘Digital Humanities’. (Contact Alice Coltheart at a.coltheart@unsw.edu.au if you want rights to post or if you want us to ingest your feeds)

This is such an exciting project. Olivia, Alice and I are really looking forward to this next year. It’s going to be hectic, but the work will be worth it for what we will build.