Keynote 1: Big Data and Resource Sharing: A speech corpus and a Virtual Laboratory for facilitating human communication science research

Abstract

Information technology has always been an area of rapid change. Two recent developments in information technology have changed the nature of research across the spectrum of disciplines and also, to a large extent, developments in the commercial and government sector: Big Data and Resource Sharing. The growth in capacity for storing and accessing data has allowed the establishment of very large databases and corpora. In turn, this has prompted developments in methods for the collection of large data and its subsequent analysis. The growing move to open source and open access, in a wide range of settings and meanings, has led to a growing awareness of the benefits of data sharing. In these contexts, in this paper I describe two platforms that we have developed over the last 4 years: AusTalk, a 3000 hour auditory-visual corpus of Australian English, and Alveo, an extensible Virtual Laboratory housing corpora and analysis tools glued together by a versatile workflow engine. I will describe the genesis and operation of each of these in some detail and set out the advantages they and resources like these provide in (i) research in the wide ranges of disciplines in Human Communication Science, and (ii) facilitating collaboration across disciplines, across institutions, and across languages, and across national boundaries in our region, and well beyond.