As many of you know, DAAO is partner in the successful bid by the Cultural Datasets Consortium to build the first virtual laboratory for humanities e-research in Australia: the HuNI project,  http://huni.net.au/ (federally funded through NeCTAR (National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources).

Conal Tuoey, the project’s technical co-ordinator who oversees the development and implementation of the HuNI VL technical infrastructure has just posted a very user friendly explanation of what the HuNI project is doing with all our data and what ‘linked data’ actually means. Some data sets such as Australian Dictionary of Biography and Australian Women’s register have already been linked. DAAO is next on the list!  http://huni.net.au/huni-linked-data-first-datasets/

Anthony White, one of our CIs from Melbourne University, just emailed me this link on the possibilities of collaborative interdisciplinary work in art research and digital humanities. This article doesn’t discuss issues of copyright, but it certainly makes clear how the mess of image copyright in digital age (and the risk adverse positions that many institutions need to adopt) presents challenges to art and design research, particularly to projects with a free and open source ethos such as DAAO. We have find that most copyright holders once contacted, are happy to share, but the resources required  for clearing copyright are  onerous.

But attitudes are changing. The introduction of thumbnail images into daao as reference tools to source images was a huge milestone for DAAO and augurs well for future collaborations around image based research.

http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/art-history-failing-internet/