DAAO interoperates with other datasets in a range of ways.  This is a quick update on a couple of recent developments with fellow humanities data sets.

HuNI
Congratulations to Prof Deb Verhoeven and the whole HuNI team for launching huni.net.au in 2014.

We’ve been playing with the Collection spring visualisations (here’s an example), which is not only a means of explaining the data, but also makes the database fun to use.  The usability of  HuNI’s interface has inspired our planned approach to DAAO’s researcher collaboration developments. In particular, it highlights the importance of simplicity – HuNI is a complex dataset, but for a user it’s simple.

We recently added the HuNI search widget to the DAAO homepage, so now you can search the HuNI dataset from DAAO.

ADELTA
The Australian Directory of Electronic Literature and Text-based Art (ADELTA) is an interactive directory of Australian writers and writing in the New Media Arts in development at the University of Western Sydney. ADELTA engaged Holly Sydney to install a RESTful disambiguation API/service on DAAO so that ADELTA can use DAAO as a name authority service.

How does the person disambiguation service work?
ADELTA is a Works based database; DAAO is  Biography based. So DAAO helps ADELTA by enabling their users to find artist records through the ADELTA interface,  and ADELTA in turn helps DAAO by contributing records.

The DAAO team is expanding as we get stuck into development.

We are lucky to have some very talented people join us, and some equally talented people return. Let me introduce you.

Somaya has a background in the arts, sound, media, broadcast, festivals, archives, libraries, digital preservation, digital collecting and curation. She has worked as a Producer of Australian Music for ABC Classic FM, as the Online Project Officer for the Australian Music Centre, and is the former Curator of Networked Media for the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. She has also undertaken consultancy work for the Australia Council for the Arts to research and deliver the Archives in the Digital Era Scoping Study Report. In recent years she has presented at conferences and symposia including the 2013 International Symposium on Electronic Art held in Sydney, and the 2013 International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives annual conference held in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Dr Anne Cregan – Semantic Advisor
Anne was previously Semantic Lead of HuNI and is currently a Board Member of Open Knowledge and Executive Director of CloudEarth.  Anne  joined us in November 2014 to write the initial scope for the first module of the project –  schema refinement.  In early 2015 Anne will guide developments to extend DAAO’s feed to HuNI.

Emily Wubben – Digital Content Officer, Melbourne
Emily is back! In 2015 she will further develop content partnerships with the University of Melbourne. More on that soon.

Since her previous role with the DAAO in 2012 as the Melbourne Digital Content Project Officer, Emily has worked for Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance on the delivery of the Galleries of Remembrance, which opened on 11 November 2014. She is a co-author of Architectural ornament: The history and art of Wilson Hall at the University of Melbourne, published by the University’s Cultural Collections department, and recently she presented a seminar paper for the Melbourne Portrait Group on the portrait of Baronne Madeleine Deslandes by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Emily is also now the Exhibitions Research Officer for the Shrine of Remembrance. She holds a Master of Art Curatorship and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from the University of Melbourne.

Annie Murney – Project Administrator
Annie is a Sydney-based arts writer and has contributed to various print and online publications such as Concrete Playground and The BRAG. Her main research area focuses on art, politics, and collectivism across the post-Soviet world.  Annie will provide administrative support to the project team.

We must also say a belated thank you to the amazing Eric Riddler and Rhonda Hamilton, who each delivered content projects in 2014 to support CI research and inform our current LIEF developments.  You can read more about their work here.

While we’ve been working on scoping technical developments for the current LIEF project, we’ve also been busy on a couple of great content projects which will support our CIs and feed in to site developments.

It’s time for a diagram! Here is a quick overview of our current project structure showing our key development deliverables and supporting project components.

The aim of our current LIEF project is to provide a framework for researchers to use DAAO data for new approaches to design & art research.  It will prepare DAAO to meet the increasingly technological assisted requirements in analysis, presentation and publication.

Developments will focus on:

Dr Gillian Fuller spoke about DAAO at Contemporary Art and Feminism‘s (CAF) Curating Feminism Conference on the weekend.

Congratulations to the CAF team on another great event!  The abstract for Gillian’s presentation is below.

DAAO is also working with CAF to fill in the gaps of feminist art exhibitions and events between 1975 – 1995. One major resource for this is Past Present: The National Women’s Art Anthology, edited by Joan Kerr and Jo Holder (Craftsman House), 1999. But surely there are more resources around. If you have information to contribute, check out DAAO’s public project page.

Curating Feminism, Thursday 23 October to Sunday 26 October 2014.
Datascapes – another kind of public space. Dr Gillian Fuller, NIEA, Art & Design, UNSW.
Design and Art Australia Online (DAAO) is a public space, more specifically it is a public space in a network of other public spaces – both digital and analogue. DAAO is an open, public and free database that holds and distributes information about Australian artists and designers, their lives, works, exhibitions, awards and more. It is a piece of public infrastructure that occupies a digital techno-cultural space that is fraught with intersecting and contradictory drives, myths and regulatory protocols and discourses.

How can public infrastructure in digital space assist curation and critically recast how data operates in public spaces?

In 2014 we’ll be carrying out infrastructure developments under DAAO’s 5th Australian Research Council LIEF grant, LE140100120 ‘Design & Art Australia Online Research Tool: enabling next generation e-Research in Australia’s visual and design cultures’.

As DAAO increases its information base through its automated harvest facilities (LIEF2012) and draws more active engagement from researchers, new demands are being placed on the facility. The 2014 project will refine schema and mappings of events and works to better match researcher queries and enable data repurposing for visualisation; automate linking facilities between established entity links; and develop researcher collaboration functionalities.

Ahead of these developments DAAO staff will be taking a break from end Dec 2013 – March 2014.  During the break all existing Members can continue to use the site as normal.  The site won’t be taking new member registrations during this period. If you landed on the site during the break please email us or leave a calling card on the home page and we’ll contact you as soon as the site opens for new member registration in March 2014.

To DAAO’s amazing community of contributors who have shared their research on the site this year, and to our research partners, thank you for a brilliant 2013.

We are so happy to announce that Dr Dorothy Erickson’s contribution of 662 artist records (with an associated 11222 entity records) from her research into artists, artisans, designers, makers and manufacturers of cultural heritage for Western Australia 1829 to 1959 has been uploaded into DAAO.  Some sample records can be seen here:

Dr Erickson is an artist and jeweller, art historian, curator,  who was the WA  Editor of ArtLink for 10 years. She was also an original contributor to the Australian Dictionary of Biography ( the legacy data on which DAAO was founded). The research she has contributed in this latest data important is really rich data with related entities in Work/Event/Recognition/externalResource/Place and was a great test for our new party matching and Import modules which handled the complexity of the matching well. It also fill significant gaps in our information base. Dr Erickson’s work and the inclusion of ( former Curtin academic, now COFA) Prof Paul Thomas’s research  from Biennale of Electronic Arts  BEAP has resulted in over 13,000 entity records relating to Western Australian artist, works and exhibition being incorporated into DAAO during the LIEF 2012 project.

To find out more about Dorothy, there is a nice interview here:

http://www.craftaustralia.org.au/library/interview.php?id=dorothy_erickson_kinetic_jewellery

As we start winding up the 2012 project- we are seeing the fruits of our labour bloom.  Our information base is really starting to grow.  Last week we finally exceeded the 10 K mark for artist and designer biographies. In fact the figure this week is 10, o99 individuals and 485 groups. This will continue to grow in the next few weeks.

Perhaps the most exciting growth has been in our newer areas of focus: exhibition and works which have doubled in size over the past year.

We have just harvested our first data set from University of Sydney, Power Institute. This is a wonderful development as we we now have a sustainable and automated workflow between the significant research held by Power Institute and DAAO.  A wonderful example of this relationship can be seen i the recent uploading of data on  exhibition : J.W. Power: Abstraction Création, Paris 1934 which is a reconstruction of J.W. Power’s 1934 Paris solo exhibition with the Abstraction Création group.  The research of  curators, Ann Stephen and  A.D.S Donaldson  was entered into Power Institute EMu system and the harvested in DAAO using a new import module. The information on works is really detailed and it is wonderful to have this research finally exposed.  You can see more here: http://www.daao.org.au/bio/event/jw-power-abstraction-creation-paris-1934-1/

We’ve been back on deck since mid January  and heads down doing final fixes on the import and party matching modules that will enable us to automatically import records from our partners.  We have already successfully tested some of our new functionalities with Deakin Research Online repository of artists’ works and imported creative works data.  http://www.daao.org.au/bio/collection/deakin-research-online/

These final stages of the 2012 LIEF project are exciting as we see all the hard work of our data manager and developers come to fruition. We are deploying these final fixes to the production site on Wednesday. On Thursday we will begin bulk imports – so get ready to watch the stats rise.

Oh and BTW; our membership is growing remarkably; last count 1602! including 149 moderators! not bad at all.  I’ll be posting more details on our membership and how people are using the site shortly.

And one more piece of happy news: DAAO is pleased to announce the birth of our second child since the project began last year. Ran and her family now have another adorable  boy, Jinbo (born three weeks ago).