A data-centred ‘virtual laboratory' for the humanities: Designing the Australian Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI) service

This article looks at the design and architecture proposed for the Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI), a national ‘virtual laboratory’, which is being developed as part of the Australian government’s National e-Research Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) programme. The article focuses on explaining the overall approach proposed for building the HuNI environment; it is not a detailed account of the technical aspects of HuNI’s architecture, nor a report on the progress of the project. Instead, it discusses how HuNI is expected to differ from other approaches used to design digital resources and tools for the humanities, and how the complex research methods used by humanities researchers will be reflected in HuNI’s design. HuNI intends to take a new approach to data aggregation and data-centred workflows for humanities research. This approach relies on an understanding of ‘humanities data’ as the various annotations, tags, links, associations, ratings, reviews, and comments produced during the humanities research process, together with the semantic ‘entities’ to which these annotations refer: concepts, persons, places, and events. A range of different data sets from various Australian providers are being ingested and transformed into Linked Data formats, and subsequently matched and aligned to a common ontology framework. A suite of virtual laboratory tools will also be deployed, enabling researchers to manipulate the aggregated data and to share their work.