I am a PhD student at the Research School of Humanities and the Arts (RSHA) at ANU. I am really interested in the possibilities of digital media for humanities research, but keenly aware that many humanities researchers still feel a bit alienated by the technology and are not taking full advantage of it.

To try to promote awareness of and interest in emerging techniques in this area, I am currently organising (with my co-convener Dr Mary Hutchison) a forum at the RSHA which will bring together Kerry Taylor from CSIRO ICT Centre, to talk about making data more flexible (by separating the data and the representation, so that digitising your data does not lock you into one format or representation of that data, and Basil Dewhurst (Trove) and a representative from the Atlas of Living Australia - the latter two providing humanities examples of data being made flexible in practice. This forum will be facilitated by and held in collaboration with Dr Paul Arthur of the National Centre for Biography, as part of his Life of Information Symposium. This was a serendipitous collaboration which happened when we found we were both trying to do much the same thing at the same time - then a week later I heard about THATcamp and I thought - OMG - zeitgeist!