Australian Digital Observatory

The Australian Digital Observatory is an ARDC platform working to establish a national infrastructure to support a diverse array of researchers, especially in the humanities, in accessing and working with dynamic digital data, including existing collections of national interest across Twitter/X, FlickR, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram and gaming platforms such as Steam and Discord.

The Australian Digital Observatory (ADO) is an interdisciplinary team of data scientists, software developers, support staff, and academics at key locations around Australia, including Brisbane (Queensland University of Technology), Sydney (UNSW), and Melbourne (The University of Melbourne).

The ADO provides an ecosystem of resources and services that enable research including data-related services, events, training and workshops, datasets, and software and technical utilities/systems.

With these resources, the ADO supports researchers throughout all stages of the research data lifecycle (explore, collect, tidy and model, store and organise, analyse, and publish). These tasks can be time-consuming and often involve a steep learning curve for specific technical skills. The ADO can reduce or eliminate this burden so that researchers can focus on analysis and interpretation.

Have a specific project? Get started here!

If you're a researcher embarking on a new project and are considering the potential support that the ADO could provide, we're here to help. Read our Researchers' Guide to Working with Digital Observatory to understand how you can use our services.

You can reach out to us directly via email (see Contact us) or fill out our enquiry form.

Featured resources

We offer a diverse catalogue of tools, datasets, documentation, and services that aim to assist researchers with the time-consuming tasks of exploring, collecting, tidying and modelling, storing and organising, analysing, and publishing data that might require specific technical skills. Below are some of our featured sources.

A full list of ADO resoures can be found here.

Explore ADO resources

Stakeholders

Collaborator

This project is done in collaboration with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC).

Project partners