Social & Cultural Informatics Platform (SCIP)
SCIP is a unit with staff who specialise in supporting digital methods for researchers in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science. Since 2015 the SCIP team has supported a broad range of digital research activities–from researcher consultations and workshops, through to partnering on local and national research projects.
The SCIP platform provides a wide range of data and research methodology support for humanities and social science researchers at The Digital Studio of The University of Melbourne
SCIP's business model is to provide up to ten hours of support and advice per year to a particular researcher, but to partner in funding applications to bring revenue back to SCIP for more detailed projects. Because of the number of projects we are involved with, any additional capacity needed has to be funded externally.
SCIP forms part of the Melbourne Collaborative Research Infrastructure Program (MCRIP). The SCIP Goverence group includes researchers, academics and professional staff from across the university.
We have expertise in the following:
Research Methodology
- Survey and quantitative methods
- Computational social science methods
- Digital humanities methods
- Mixed methods
Data Analysis
- Data management and storage
- Data wrangling
- Data visualization (e.g., interactive mapping, geocoding, animations, VR)
- Statistical modelling
- Text mining (e.g., semantic analysis and topic modeling)
- Geospatial analysis
- Webscraping and digital data extraction methods including social media and APIs
- Static and temporal social network analysis
- Agent-based modelling
- Computational linguistics and natural language processing
Collaborations
- Grant planning and support
- Consultations and face-to-face support
- Training workshops on statistical tools and methodology
- Collaborations with platforms and services across the university
Software Support
- R
- Python
- Stata
- Tableau
- NVivo
- Latex
- Omeka
- Orange3
SCIP Pricing Structure
| Activity Type / Description | Pricing |
| Expert Informatics support Single consultation session; Up to 1-day support for approved projects. |
Free |
| Prioritised Un-Funded Projects SCIP supports unfunded projects that develop the digital HASS capability and align with the University's digital research priorities. Supported schemes will be considered by the SCIP Governance which includes faculty internal grants, near-miss funding, articulated seed grant schemes, phased grant schemes with seed/planning/development phases. |
Free |
| Funded Projects SCIP provides dedicated informatics support on research projects that are funded or have available funds. Any budget reductions of successful grants can be adjusted to meet any budgeted SCIP costs. |
Daily rate at A7 level |
| External Projects (contract rates) External projects are those where SCIP is contracted by an organisation external to the University, such as national HASS infrastructure projects. (Collaborative projects with internal CIs and external partners are ordinarily not considered external projects.) |
Specific to project scope. |
Contact us to learn more about our services.
Keep up-to-date with the range of SCIP training, workshops and events.
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Regular expressions for Humanities researchers (25th June 2020)
Learn how to use regular expressions. Convert texts and search for patterns within your data.
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Build an interactive Covid-19 map using Leaflet and Shiny (date TBC)
Learn to build an interactive Covid-19 transmission map.
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Automate data collection with web-scraping (date TBC)
COMING SOON
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Tools for collecting and analysing twitter data (date TBC)
COMING SOON
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Let’s talk about tidy data. (date TBC)
Tidy data is data that is easy to model, visualise and aggregate.
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Using APIs in humanities and social science research. (date TBC)
A gentle introduction to APIs - the building blocks of the web.
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Research Essentials: Managing your data (date TBC)
Cover the basics of file-naming conventions, metadata, backups, file formats and more.
Check out some of the research projects we have contributed to in the past below:
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Blood Exhibition (Science Gallery)
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.
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Making Futures: Youth Identity, Generational Change & Education (Prof Julie McLeod)
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.
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Representing Family Lives on Instagram (Dr Signe Ravn, Dr Ashley Barnwell)
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.
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Studies of Childhood, Education & Youth Research (Prof Julie McLeod, Dr Kate O’Connor)
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.
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Digitising Melbourne's History Books: Sands & McDougall Directories (Prof Andrew May)
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.
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The Innovative Learning Environments and Teacher Change (A/Prof Wesley Imms, Prof John Hattie, et al)
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.
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The International Classroom Lexicon Project (Mrs Carmel Mesiti, Prof David Clarke, et al)
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.