The Network for Early European Research

§ 1 The main government funding body for research in higher education institutions in Australia – the Australian Research Council (ARC) – established a Research Networks programme in 2004. Its purpose was to build large-scale groups of researchers and encourage them to collaborate across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. In all, twenty-four research networks were funded under this programme, with a total of AU$42 million being allocated over a five-year period (2004-2009).

§ 2 The Network for Early European Research (NEER) was one of only two ARC networks in the humanities (Trigg 2006). It was based at the University of Western Australia, where its executive and secretariat were located, even though most of its academic activities (conferences, seminars, and workshops) took place three thousand kilometres away on the Eastern side of Australia. More than 350 individual researchers registered as Network participants. They came from most of Australia's thirty-nine universities, and ranged from eminent academics through to postgraduate students and early career researchers. The Network also included institutional members, among them several of the larger Australian universities, and a number of industry partners, drawn from commercial publishers, public collecting institutions, and community groups.

§ 3 NEER was able to draw on a strong existing tradition of collaboration among Australian researchers. The Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (ANZAMEMS) has been active for many years (Condren 2010), and its journal Parergon has an international reach which includes distribution through the North American journal publishing consortium known as Project MUSE. There are formal research centres at several universities, including the University of Sydney, Monash University, the University of Queensland and the University of Western Australia. Several Australian cities support cross-institutional interest groups with community involvement; the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group (PMRG) is a typical example.

§ 4 Before NEER was established, Australian researchers were already productive and internationally recognized for the quality of their work. NEER worked to develop a nationally coherent and planned framework for this research, with five main themes: Cultural Memory; Social Fabric; Intellectual Formations: Science, Medicine and the Environment; Religion and Spirituality; and Early European/Australasian Connections. Many of NEER's academic activities were organized around these five themes, with each area arranging and supporting conferences, seminars, postgraduate advanced training workshops, and meetings to develop specific research agendas and collaborative grant applications. NEER also supported smaller groups (research clusters) focusing on more specific topics, ranging from the British Enlightenment to Latin's long histories.

§ 5 NEER pursued formal links with international research groups in the medieval and early modern field. In particular, it was one of the organizations which supported the formation in 2006 of CARMEN (the Co-operative for the Advancement of Research through a Medieval European Network) as a new umbrella group for medieval research in Europe. NEER co-hosted CARMEN's 2007 meeting in Prato, Italy. CARMEN has since become a vehicle for the coordination of grant applications across the European Union, and has established a number of smaller thematic groups.

NEER's digital services

§ 6 The ARC expected its research networks to be active in the development of shared information technologies and knowledge management tools, new databases, and new technologies for communication and interaction. These activities were seen as part of the essential e-research infrastructure which would be needed to underpin collaborative research in a national setting. An agenda of this kind was an integral part of NEER's vision (Burrows 2005). A digital environment was crucial if NEER was to become a true research community. Traditional face-to-face academic activities – conferences, meetings, training programmes and the like – would be insufficient to develop a real sense of shared research purpose across the Australian continent.

§ 7 Implementing a digital environment for NEER was not a straightforward process. There were no existing Australian and international examples in the humanities which could be readily copied or adapted, and there were no suitable computational models of humanities research processes on which to base an integrated software solution. Moreover, NEER had only very limited funds for software development and maintenance. The only viable strategy was to identify existing software which could be quickly deployed, did not require extensive support or modification, could be used by all participants, and met NEER's main requirements:

• a collaborative space, usable by all participants, which enabled them to communicate with each other and the international community, to document and promote work-in-progress, and to develop grant applications, research projects and publications collaboratively;
• a repository for depositing and storing research outputs, also usable by all participants; and,
• a resource discovery service for identifying Early European museum objects, artworks and manuscripts in Australian collections.

§ 8 NEER did not set up its own computing infrastructure. Instead, it contracted with I.T. units at the University of Western Australia to host the digital services developed by NEER. This meant taking into account a series of additional factors, including the operational plans and priorities of these I.T. units, and their preferences and capacities for software support and maintenance – particularly in relation to Open Source software.

Future directions

§ 18 Australian Research Council funding for NEER ended in June 2010, and the ARC has no plans to revive its Networks Programme. However, it has recently funded a Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions which is based at the University of Western Australia and builds on the collaborative framework established by NEER. The Centre will receive AU$24.25 million over seven years and is expected to be able to support the continued existence of Confluence as a vehicle for communication and collaboration. ANZAMEMS is committed to continuing NEER's postgraduate training seminars, and has expressed an interest in including Confluence among the services it provides to its members. As a scholarly association, it may also be willing to encourage and promote the contribution of further material to PioNEER, which will continue to be hosted by the University of Western Australia.

§ 19 Europa Inventa will also continue to be hosted at the University of Western Australia and is already serving as a platform for new research projects. A medium-term goal is to develop e-research services like annotation, integration and visualization around Europa Inventa, in much the same way as the Aus-e-Lit project is adding these kinds of tools to the AustLit database (Gerber and Hunter 2010). Another goal is to expose the metadata from Europa Inventa into a Linked Data environment, with the aim of cross-linking with European and North American databases that contain records for similar types of material. NEER has already been closely involved in the work of the CARMEN Medieval Manuscripts Research Group, which has been examining the application of these kinds of Semantic Web technologies to medieval manuscript research. A European Science Foundation Exploratory Workshop on this topic, held at the University of Birmingham (U.K.) in April 2009, resulted in the development of a Road Map to guide future plans and funding applications. These developments have been inspired by several innovative European projects working on the application of the Semantic Web to cultural heritage collections, notably MuseumFinland and MultimediaN e-Culture (Hyvönen 2005; Hyvönen et al. 2009; Van Ossenbruggen et al. 2007; Schreiber et al. 2008).

§ 20 More generally, the landscape for collaborative e-research services in the humanities has changed significantly in Australia in the six years since NEER was established. Humanities researchers found it difficult to articulate their needs within the constraints of Federal Government programmes like NCRIS (National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy) and NeAT (National e-Research Architecture Taskforce) during the period 2005 to 2011. But there is now an explicit recognition that the humanities should be specifically provided for in the next round of e-research infrastructure funding, and new programmes like NeCTAR (National eResearch Collaboration Technologies and Resources) appear to offer much greater opportunities for humanities researchers. Nevertheless, discipline-based research communities like medieval and early modern studies will still need to be able to conceptualize their e-research requirements in sufficiently generic terms. The experience gained from NEER's digital programme is likely to be an invaluable part of that process.