Volume 4, No 1, 2007
Bridging the Mire between E-Research and E-Publishing for Multimedia Digital Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences: An Australian Case Study
Andrew Jakubowicz
Abstract
Digital media developments confront the humanities and social sciences with major challenges in exploiting multimedia rich data sets. A critical need is demonstrated to bridge the divide between the building of multimedia digital repositories, and the publishing of research outcomes that exploit the interactive potential of digital media. Software that melds the steps in digital research and publishing, now disparate environments, into a single sequence of integrated procedures can provide a critical innovation for the transformation of digital research and publishing from a quasi-craftlike and demanding set of skills, into a transparent and user-directed flow process. Humanities and social science (HSS) researchers who use multimedia data could be working more collaboratively, creatively and with far more international impact. The HSS have not yet exploited the interactive and collaborative potential offered by interactive computer technologies, and the expansion of digital repositories. Digital publishing has opened opportunities to incorporate both interactivity and multimedia into scholarly publishing, permitting new modes of visualization and creating ever mutable texts. Open Source software, can offer an internationally significant break-through in research definition, data collection and management, and interactive publishing, leading to a major paradigm shift in eHumanities and eSocialScience. The article proposes a framework for bridging the gap, overcoming the silo problem and building an interactive multimedia research environment (m.i.r.e.).
Pages: 1-9
Keywords: Digital data chain; Open repositories; Humanities and social sciences; Scholarly e-publishing; Semantic web; Multimedia; Interactivity; Australia