Several potentially useful e-research tools for social and educational researchers were presented at e-research Australasia 2007 conference. Most (all) of them have not been finished yet. Nevertheless, feel free to go ahead and to see the demos or explore prototypes. Here some annotated links.
RAMS - Research Activity Management System
RAMS (Macquarie) is a platform for managing collaborative research processes. According to the project description, RAMS focuses on capturing e-research activity flows, so that they can be analysed, shared, re-used and adapted. The tool, seems, is mainly designed for the activities common in collaborative HASS research projects (and cognitive science). RAMS is based on very similar idea as LAMS (LearningAMS) and has been developed by the same MELCORE. The final RAMS version should include functions for managing a full research cycle (from grant planning to dissemination), something for RQF management, online research collaboration activities and “process-oriented (sic!) research data collection from human subjects”. Current RAMS demo is fully functional, but essentially supports rigorously structured and pre-planed collaborative online work. (It might be useful for developing collaborative research skills, but not sure if experienced scientists will like it). Both RAMS demo website and beta download are available.
Large e-research tools for ethnographers
Annotea (QU) - a tool for ethnographic video and image-based research. It supports annotation, coding and analysis of images and video and collaborative online research environment around these images. Also provides functionalities for storage, metatagging and retrieval of data from video/image repositories. Potentially could be a very useful tool for video-based educational research and building of such data repositories (classroom observations, etc.). A nice and attractive demo is available on QU e-research website (See "Valnotea" that, seems, is a broader project for collaborative indexing, annotation and discussion of audiovisual content over broadband networks).
PS. Quite similar tool for collaborative linguistic research is EtnoER (Melbourne).
Nice and simple e-research tools
FieldHelper (USyd) - a program for annotating digital objects (audio, video, images, texts) with the relevant metadata necessary for import then into a repository. Specifically designed for managing data that needs to be organised using time and/or space (e.g. historical, archaeological data).
Heurist (USyd) - a Web 2.0-style tool that integrates bibliographic references, web bookmarks, annotations, notes with other research data in a collaborative environment. Heurist is currently used for archaeological projects. A demo of beta Heurist is available. (NB. Quite interesting presentation arguing about the appropriateness of Web 2.0 technology for e-research middleware platforms).
Related presentations
- Tom Honeyman: FieldHelper: A tool to assist the collation of field data and its ingestion into repositories. URL
- Ian Johnson: Beyond bibliographies: integrating research data in a unified collaborative framework. URL
- Jane Hunter: Harvesting community tags and annotations to augment institutional repository metadata. URL
- James Dalziel, Ray Warouw, and Chi Nguyen: ASK-OSS, DRAMA and RAMS: eResearch support from MELCOE. URL
PS. More comments on other conference presentations are to follow...