DH Downunder 2019

We are excited to announce that DH Downunder 2019 will be held at the beautiful NeW Space facility at the University of Newcastle, Australia, from 9-13 December.

Registrations are now open!

(Right hand image by Benicio Murray, Creative Commons Licence).

There is an associated conference on Knowledge Creation in the 21st Century: Approaches to Open, Digital Scholarship, which will be held in the same location, on Friday 6th and Saturday 7th December. The call for papers for that event is currently open.

Classes

The list of classes can be found here.

Please see below for the timetable to find out what sessions are in parallel, and which are at different times.

Timetable

The timetable is now available. Click through for a searchable / accessible version or see below for an overview. The event starts at 10am on Monday 9th, and runs from 9-5 on all other days.

We have five parallel sessions most of the time, so you will need to select your timetable carefully so there are no clashes. You do not have to stick with a single stream all week. You can take some classes from one and some from another as long as they don't clash. Some classes have a cap on numbers, so if you are especially interested in a particular class, you should register early.

Classes coloured the same are with the same instructor in a series. Classes with white backgrounds are single half-day classes. Some sessions of multi-part classes can be attended even if you did not attend the rest. Anything marked as "intermediate" or "advanced" can usually be attended without the "beginner" session for people with some previous experience in the topic. Please see the full class description for details or contact the instructor to ask. The Intermediate D3 Visualisation class should be accessible to anyone who attended last year's D3 class (or to anyone who attends this year's beginner session). The spreadsheets classes can each be attended without the other.

Most importantly, no sessions of any classes are repeats of anything else in this program (although some are repeats of last year's classes).

Please note there has been a change to Linked Open Data: instead of running all day Tues, Weds, Thurs, it is now a one-day session on the Thursday. If you had planned to take LOD on Tues and Weds, you might consider the Serious Games session or Intro to Python on the Tuesday, and the Open Tools for Open Data session on the Wednesday instead.

Registrations

Registrations are now open, at a cost of $150 for the full week (earlybird, bookings up until September 30th), or $200 (bookings from October 1st). Single day registrations are also available at $75 (earlybird) or $100. Refunds will be available only up until October 1st, as we will then need to start spending the money received (on e.g. instructor travel) and will no longer have it available to refund.

In order to keep the costs this low, please note that we will not be providing catering for the event, unless we happen to get some sponsorship to do so. You are welcome to bring your lunch, or to find a cafe nearby. We calculated that provision of a fully catered event would require registrations of $400, and we have no doubt you can provide yourselves with coffee and lunch for less than this difference.

A limited number of free registrations are available for those experiencing financial hardship. Applications for these will be accepted by email to dhdownunder.au@gmail.com . To apply for a registration waiver, please send a list of the classes you would like to take, a short (one paragraph max) statement about why you are interested in taking them, and a short (1 paragraph max) explanation of why you require the waiver. These waivers are still available.

Location

The classes will be held at the NeW Space campus in downtown Newcastle. Please note this is in a different part of town from the main university campus, if you are familiar with that.

NeW Space is located at the corner of Hunter and Auckland Streets, and is approximately a 50 minute bus ride or 30 minute taxi ride from the airport, or a short bus ride from the train station. Trains to Newcastle are frequent and inexpensive from Sydney (you can use the Sydney Opal card).

Accommodation

Newcastle University does not have on-campus accommodation near the location at which DH Downunder will be held. The Oriental Hotel, the Crown and Anchor, the Travelodge, the Ibis, and the Star Apartments are all a short walk from the venue, and have reasonable rates.

We have negotiated a special conference rate for the Travelodge of $140 per night. Please book by email to newcastle@travelodge.com.au, use booking code: TH12614565 and book before 15 November.

We have also negotiated a rate for the Ibis of $139 / night. Contact 4925-2266 (phone) or h3236-re@accor.com (e-mail) to book, and please quote the promo code KNOW051219.

There are also backpackers and AirBnB options.

Contact

DH Downunder 2019 is primarily organised by Rachel Hendery and in 2019 it is a joint activity of Western Sydney University and Newcastle University. We are grateful for co-organisation support from Hugh Craig, VIctoria Haskins, Bill Pascoe, and Ray Siemens. We are also grateful to the instructors, who are this year from University of Victoria, Western Sydney University, ANU, UTS, Curtin, Newcastle University, and Macquarie University. Finally, we would like to thank CAPOS (the Canadian-Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship), which has this year obtained grant funding to bring instructors from Canada to the event.

For questions about the event in general, please contact Rachel Hendery at dhdownunder.au@gmail.com

For questions about an individual class, you can either contact Rachel, or contact the instructor directly.