Whether you’re researching the habits of marine life, ancient texts or just a new way to market products, you’ll likely need some funding to get your studies underway. The Internet is a great place to start looking for sources of funding, and we’ve put together a list here of a hundred or so places where you can get some assistance for your next big research project (link)

There is a prevailing historical connection between Australia’s colonial experience and our dominant intellectual tradition. Throughout the nation’s short history of settlement, most of our leading intellectuals and rulers have displayed a certain ‘practicality’ that is an Australian adaptation of a British creation. This practicality disguises its hegemony through the doctrines of ‘commonsense’ and ‘factual truth’. Practical thinking has its roots in a form of Utilitarianism that is perpetuated by and primarily beneficial to a powerful Anglo elite (link)

But the great English problem is short-term practical thinking. This is a country that has the institutional strength and wealth to build long-term visions, to navigate itself through social complexity, but instead this is a nation whose institutions stumble from one crisis to the next, limited by the practical constraints of what ever funding is available, mistakes were made, or ideas are fashionable. Heathrow, the train systems, the roads, and universities are all impoverished by a Kafkaesque hell-ride of uncritical social realist practicality; unable to imagine a world that isn’t about filling in one pot hole and then running to fill in the next (then forgetting about the first one and wondering why they need to be filled in anyway because the workers weren’t told about the road).

Whilst most Western countries (notably my own, Australia), used the boom years to pay off Government debt, England went into more Government debt unable to fathom perhaps that economies eventually crumble. So rather than have some money in the bank to navigate through the bad times, a short-term practical solution will now need to be found (borrow more money).

Practicality is a English game; it is theatre, it is the uncritical deference one must make to this culture in order to survive (like one must to ‘Egalitarianism’ in Australia). It is how England got here. Two thousand years of stumbling-practically through the word; learning by doing, then forgetting. Two thousand years trapped in the practical now; the parochial practical present. Sure practicality can be useful, but then again, it needs just a tad more intellectual scaffolding otherwise enjoy your wait at Heathrow.

The views expressed in this blog are always entirely my own and I wrote about this stuff many years ago as an undergrad. Here is the link. The link to ‘the English disease’ (short-termism) and Heathrow was first made by Ken Livingston.

A Finnish internet community is seeking to apply the collective approach taken by online collaborators like the authors of Wikipedia to start converting used petrol-fuelled cars to electric ones, with the first roll-out due this year (link).

The National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) is the first publicly-funded text mining
centre in the world. We provide text mining services in response to the requirements
of the UK academic community. NaCTeM is operated by the University of Manchester with close collaboration with the University of Tokyo (link)

At the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory we conduct original research, develop new ways of disseminating information, and foster the innovative adaptation of existing tools. Our cross-disciplinary work in the areas of data-harvesting, textual content analysis, and document encoding puts us at the forefront of a global conversation about the future of communication (link).

As part of its development, the Pre-Raphaelite Resource digitisation project recently commissioned an audience research study to consult users about whether the inclusion of Web 2.0 features on a resource of this type would be useful or important to the education community. The report indicated that:

“there is some readiness among the education community for Web 2.0 technologies but only in the context of academia as a status-conscious, competitive environment. Whilst there are clear benefits to be achieved from providing teachers and students with the opportunity to share ideas in the context of stimulus artefacts, many hold reservations about ‘giving away’ their intellectual property.” (link)

Metadata is sometimes defined literally as ‘data about data,’ but the term is normally understood to mean structured data about resources that can be used to help support a wide range of operations. These might include, for example, resource description and discovery, the management of information resources and their long-term preservation (link).

The workshop aims to stimulate discussions between the UK and Australasian arts, humanities and cultural heritage communities about the use of e-Research infrastructures, services, technologies and methodologies. To this end, it is soliciting contributions (both presentations and papers) on topics relevant to e-Research in an arts, humanities and cultural heritage context.

Details of the workshop and the submission process may be found at http://www.eresearch.edu.au/ahch-workshop

December 7-12, 2008, Indianapolis, USA

An Initiative of DReSNet: Digital Repositories in e-Science Network
(http://www.dresnet.net <http://www.dresnet.net/>)

There is a great, untapped potential for synergies between
grid/e-science technologies and a cluster of related systems addressing
the management of digital assets in digital libraries and repositories.
The digital material generated from and used by academic and other
research is to an increasing extent being held in formal data management
systems; these systems are variously categorized as digital
repositories, libraries or archives, although the distinction between
them relates more to the sort of data that they contain and the use to
which the data is put, rather than to any major difference in
functionality. Modern repository systems allow us to move away from the
model of a stand-alone repository, library or archive, where objects are
simply deposited for subsequent access and download. Instead,
researchers are developing more sophisticated models in which these
containers of data are integrated components of a larger e-Science
research infrastructure, incorporating advanced tools and workflows, and
are being used to model complex webs of information and capture
scholarly or scientific processes in their entirety, from raw data
through to final publications. Repositories have been successfully
combined with data grid technologies, and in addition computational
grids seem to offer possible applications in digital preservation and
curation, such as automatic metadata extraction and index creation.
These systems thus could add value to the data-driven research lifecycle
in e-Science.

Session chairs are:

* Andreas Aschenbrenner - University of Goettingen
* Tobias Blanke - Centre for e-Research, King’s College London
* Mark Hedges - Centre for e-Research, King’s College London

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

* Digital preservation and curation in research infrastructures
* Cyberinfrastructures (e.g. data grid technologies) to support digital
preservation and curation
* Creation and maintenance of asset management for research data
* Provenance
* Federated repositories: content modelling, metadata creation and in
particular ontology mapping
* Data grid technologies and their role in digital curation and preservation
* Metadata Extraction
* Creation and maintenance of digital libraries for research data
* Access control and security across infrastructure and asset management
systems
* Persistent identification for research data and digital objects across
e-Infrastructure
* Provenance and authenticity of digital objects in distributed
e-Infrastructure
* Information and data services in e-Science applications
* Architecture of Participation: Web 2.0 applications
* Workflow Integration
* Security

Important dates:

* Deadline for Submission of full papers: August 08, 2008
* Notification of Acceptance: September 15, 2008
* Final submission of camera-ready papers: September 29, 2008

For further details on the topics of the session, the programme
committee, and the submission details, please visit either
http://escience2008.iu.edu/ or http://dresnet.net/ieee-escience-2008-cfp