The Australian National Corpus has been established in an effort to make currently scattered and relatively inaccessible data available to researchers through an online portal. In contrast to other national corpora, it is conceptualised as a linked collection of many existing and future language resources representing language use in Australia, unified through common technical standards. This approach allows us to bootstrap a significant collection and add value to existing resources by providing a unified, online tool-set to support research in a number of disciplines. This paper provides an outline of the technical platform being developed to support the corpus and a brief overview of some of the collections that form part of the initial version of the Australian National Corpus.

Governments worldwide are faced with the challenge of creating research e-infrastructures to not only manage but also make accessible and discoverable increasingly large amounts of research data. Universities in turn are under pressure to ensure that their research strategies and support services are aligned with these national imperatives. This paper describes a nationally funded Australian university initiative to build a research e-infrastructure layer which connects individual researchers and the University to the Research Data Australia service in order to expose details of their research activity as well as available research data outputs. As governments work towards fully functional e-infrastructures which will be both cross-disciplinary and cross-border, the semantic metadata exchange service described in this paper offers a model which supports the interactive discovery of, and navigation to, content that may reside locally or across the world.

In this paper, I discuss some of the more salient intellectual and technological dimensions of work over the past year, focused on developing an open source knowledge creation, management and publication system. In key respects, our work seeks to anticipate developments in national collaborative e-research infrastructure over the next five or so years. Especially in view of recent statements on innovation policy by the Australian government, we can expect the next five or so years will see significant advances in the development of online knowledge repositories for not only more complex kinds of quantitative research data, but also for qualitative data in rich and diverse media forms that will offer new possibilities for humanities research. We will also see improved or new middleware, allowing Australian research communities in the humanities collaboratively to create, share and interrogate new knowledge of cultural and social phenomena. However, if humanities researchers are to exploit these and other possible advances in digital research infrastructure, then what they will also need are ‘tools’ enabling the creation, reception and use of knowledge that these infrastructural advances can put into intellectual circulation. They will need the means of using networked digital technologies as primary media for research, and to publish their findings as complex multimedia artifacts.