Today I found several articles about three Australian middleware development projects (ARROW, DART and ARCHER) funded under the DEST Research Information Infrastructure Initiative (RII).
Treloar A, & Groenewegen, D. (2007). ARROW, DART and ARCHER: A Quiver Full of Research Repository and Related Projects, Ariadne, 51. URL
Paterson, M., Lindsay, D., Monotti, A., Chin, A. (2007). DART: a new missile in Australia’s e-research strategy, Online Information Review, 31 (2), 16-134. DOI 10.1108/14684520710747185. URL
Are they relevant to social research?
All three projects (all lead Monash University) aim to create environments for different aspects of e-research. Some citations, to get some main ideas:
“DART project is a co-ordinated effort that aims to enhance e-research by providing new solutions to all elements of the e-research process, from the generation of research data to the publication, annotation and re-use of data and results" (Paterson et al., 2007, pp. 116-117).
“It [DART] essentially sets out to develop a new system for managing research activity and communication, which will address issues that arise throughout the entire research process. In doing so, it aims to support and allow researchers, end users and computer systems to manage the creation, collection, annotation and publication of digital data and documents, while increasing access for researchers and the public. Its ultimate objective is to provide greater visibility of and access to publicly funded research. The project builds on earlier models, such as ARROW, that deal with scholarly communication by adding the research process itself as well as the process of annotation. Significantly, it aims to provide access to datasets and other digital objects in addition to publications that utilise those datasets. It aims to enable datasets to be treated in the same way as publications. The benefits include the prevention of data loss and the ability for researchers to locate archival datasets" (Paterson et al., 2007, p. 124).
“It focuses upon improving access to publicly funded research by providing researchers and others with the ability to link those datasets with the published articles, thus ensuring the accuracy of the provenance of the original data on which the articles are based.” (Paterson et al., 2007, p. 128).
What struck me is the relevance of the tools and ways in which research could be done for educational research.
- The first idea is a possibility to build a bank of well annotated automatically collected e-learning logs and transcripts. It would be a goldmine for learning scientists researching e-learning processes. (An environment for analysing data, collaborating or publishing would be a bonus).
- The second idea - less original - is a possibility to access standard datasets, which are used in social research (both institutional and/or collected specially for research purposes) and link them to results reported in the papers. Not sure if everyone liked this, but sure that such possibility would improve government’s accountability for public services and researchers’ accountability for publicly funded research.
Of course, nothing is said in the papers (and probably in the RII projects) about the social or educational research (there are examples from crystallography, climate change, etc.). However, if the middleware is to be in place, then “the ability of individuals to make meaningful use of the plethora of data” (as the paper puts it) could be developed too. (Social scientists are not so different from crystallographers.)