Digital Humanities for a different purpose

This chapter explores the recent application of Digital Humanities (DH) methods to a database for Australia-Japan Research and Industrial Collaboration (DAJRIC) and assesses their potential utility to a project outside of traditional scholarly purposes. The primary objective of this chapter is twofold: (i) to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach in serving our purposes, and (ii) to consider the scalability of the pilot database to accommodate numerous yet unfunded Japanese-Australian research projects. By developing a Heurist database, the project can harness the intuitive design principles that make DH methods so effective and appealing for scholarly purposes to users unfamiliar with these research fields. Throughout this process, the project team has discovered the challenges of raw data, ontology development, and bilingual functionality that face a project of this scale, whilst also realising the potential of Digital Humanities' techniques in providing improved user interactivity and search functionality through record types and their connections with each other, and through data visualisation. These techniques, when applied with knowledge organisation techniques, enable a scalable database that can organically grow with the hundreds of projects to be entered in the future. As such, this project provides a valid example of how scholarly techniques within the Digital Humanities can be applied successfully to projects that act as a gateway between academia and other sectors.