The Social & Cultural Informatics Platform


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.


Platform services

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 processin

Software Support

  • R
  • Python
  • Stata
  • Tableau
  • NVivo
  • Latex
  • Omeka
  • Orange3

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


For more information about the wider platform community, please visit Research Website, which is available to all visitors.

Details about the University’s research infrastructure related resources and services can be found on Research Gateway, which is available to the University of Melbourne staff and Graduate Researchers.


Contact us

Platform email: scip-enquiries.unimelb.edu.au


Staff contacts

NamePositionEmail
Mr Greg D'Arcy Informatics Specialist/Platform Administrator gregory.darcy@unimelb.edu.au
Dr Trent Ryan Data Scientist trent.ryan@unimelb.edu.au
Ms Amanda Belton Data Scientist amanda.belton@unimelb.edu.au



SCIP is guided by our Steering Committee (membership details listed below) and User Committee .

Governance

  • Prof. Rachel Fensham (Chair) (SCIP CI and Assistant Dean Digital Studio, Faculty of Arts)
  • A/Prof. Nick Thieberger (SCIP CI & Platform Manager, Faculty of Arts)
  • Prof. Sophie Arkoudis (ADR MGSE, Ass. Director Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education
  • Dr Kathryn Coleman (SCIP CI, MGSE)
  • Ms Cat Knights (Research Manager, Faculty of Arts)
  • Dr Bella Blaher (Manager, Research & Industry, Melbourne Education Research Institute (MERI), MGSE)
  • Ms Donna McRostie (Deputy Director, Research and Collection Stewardship, Student and Scholarly Services)
  • Dr Lyle Winton (Manager, Digital Stewardship, Research and Collection Stewardship, Student and Scholarly Services)
  • Dr Andrew Siebel (Melbourne Data Analytics Platform)
  • Dr Robert Lazarus (Faculty of Arts)
  • Dr Fabio Martioli (Faculty of Arts)


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.

While our main office is based in the Digital Studio, Level 2 Arts West building (West Wing), we are currently working remotely and can be contacted for meetings and consultations by appointment.