Arts and Humanities and ICT

Following on from my previous blog post about the JISC- Future of Research? conference, the next parallel session I attended was “Evolution and Revolution in ICT and Arts and Humanities research”.

The first presenter was Simon Tanner from King’s College London who spoke about some JISC digitised collections. No slides from this one I’m afraid as he showed us pretty pictures instead!

The next speaker was from Mimas who spoke about “long tails and efficiencies of scale”. The slides for this one are available and of particular relevance to myself and the NGS, was the observation that services have to show –

• User demand
• Benefits
• Impact and value
• Sustainability

This is something that the NGS has been undertaking recently and will continue to do so as we come up for refunding next year. You may have seen a small flurry of stats etc on the website and we have been undertaking more stats gathering behind the scenes from the proliferation of data available from usage stats and user applications. From this we are building up a picture of user demand, impact and value etc.

We hope that our users will help us by contributing to our forthcoming annual user survey and our follow up roadshow survey. If you have attended any NGS roadshows we would be grateful if you could complete the short survey which will take about a minute to complete! This will help us shape future roadshow events and also analyse the benefits that users get from attending these events.

The final speaker was John Coleman from the University of Oxford who presented on “Large Scale Computational Research in Arts and Humanities”. He started with an interesting fact that in 2008 YouTube was the second most popular search engine with people looking for speech / audio instead of text. He is currently working on a JISC funded project to “mine a year of speech” which aims to annotate a years worth of data in the form of a corpus. To do this he is currently using about 20 computers set up as a cluster in a local lab. However he is now looking at placing the data in several other universities which he says is “like grid computing”. John also highlighted a report available on "ICT Tools for searching, annotation and analysis of audiovisual material" which may be of interest to people.

The JISC Future of Research? conference had some very interesting parallel sessions and I hope it continues next year!

Centralising your IT support - thoughts from the JISC Conference

Last Tuesday the NGS was out on the road with an exhibition stand at the JISC Future of Research conference which was held in London and online.

As well as speaking to delegates browsing the exhibition stands, I also went to some very interesting parallel sessions. The first session I attended was “Centralising your IT Support for Research” and consisted of 3 presentations including Mary Visser, Director of IT from the University of Leicester. Mary talked about how researchers want “free at point of use” as funders are unwilling to pay FEC for these, seeing IT as basic facilities which should be provided by the institution. Leicester currently have an IT research liaison manager who speaks to researchers about their IT needs and provides guidance and advice about local and national resources. Sounds like something that many of our users would like!

Mary’s presentation for a centralised IT support service was countered by Rob Procter from Manchester e-Research Centre who argued the case for more distributed IT provision within schools and departments. Rob pointed out that many researchers do not trust IT services to provide what they need as they are teaching focused with most of their effort going in this direction rather than towards research. Robs argument for embedding IT staff in departments is certainly one I’ve heard many times before and I’ve also seen some very good results and collaborations come out of these situations.

Here at the NGS we realise that not all universities have IT services that can help with grid computing or even the use of computing in research. The NGS can’t have technical staff based in every institution in the country but we do have a variety of means to try and help from afar.

Check this list to see if you have a local Campus Champion who can provide some advice or support to you in your institution. If you don’t have a Campus Champion, we have our helpdesk where knowledgeable staff can answer your queries by email. We also have a variety of tutorials to talk you through getting started and running jobs. If there is anything else you would find useful regards training material then please let us know!