Social & Cultural Informatics Platform (SCIP)

Australia is home to hundreds of different Indigenous languages that have been spoken here for thousands of years. This research project led by Prof Rachel Nordlinger and Assoc Prof Nick Thieberger mapped words for 'blood' in more than 200 of these languages.

Making Futures is a qualitative study of young people’s journeys through the senior years of secondary schooling. It explores how young people navigate their educational, social and familial worlds, and imagine and work toward their futures. The project seeks to gain insights into perceptions of gender relations and perspectives on diverse forms of social issues and differences.

This project explores the representation of family life on Instagram. We focus specifically on how different generations display family relationships through images and text online. Looking at trends such as #throwbackfathersday, we examine how Instagram works as a site to reimagine, construct, narrate, and discuss contemporary family lives.

The SOCEY project develops a new research platform for qualitative social science that enables creative, critical and careful engagement with open data agendas. SCIP is helping to develop a platform to connect researchers working in this interdisciplinary field, and develop a qualitative data archive, tailored specifically for studies of childhood, youth and education.

The Sands & McDougall directories, published between 1857 and 1974, record the names, addresses and occupations of residents and businesses of Melbourne and its surrounding suburbs. Supporting the digitisation of 20,000 pages of the directories, SCIP has helped University of Melbourne Historians open new avenues for historical research.

ILETC is an ARC linkage project that explores how Innovative Learning Environments (ILEs) have disrupted the traditional classroom setup with spaces that have the power to engage students in new ways. Eight chief investigators lead the project with three research fellows, six PhD students and a number of industry partners. SCIP provided advice in the early stages of the project in solutions for data collection, storage and sharing across the distributed project team.

Experienced teachers, researchers and mathematics community members, contributed to the documentation of the professional vocabulary of teachers to describe the pedagogical practice of the middle school mathematics classroom. SCIP worked with Carmel and the team to visualise the Australian Lexicon with an interactive webpage.