Community
The Heurist Network is a thriving community of scholars, librarians, archivists and programmers across the world. When you choose Heurist, you are not merely selecting a technology for your project—you are joining a community who can support and help develop your work.
Create a Heurist database (free institutionally-supported services)
These free services are kindly supported by Intersect Australia, Huma-Num (France) and contributions from users.
The Heurist Network Association
Heurist Network is a non-profit Association (registration W751274398, SIREN 930 270 749) established under French law in 2024 to provide broader-based community support of the Heurist infrastructure and software development.
The Association replaces previous arrangments with the University of Sydney Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The Heurist support team remains the same.
The Heurist mailing list
The Heurist mailing list began in France in 2020, and has quickly grown into a vibrant forum for help and discussion.
You can write to the mailing list with questions, requests for help, to promote your work, or to initiate a discussion about data management and publication practices in the Humanities. Contributions are welcome in either French or English.
To join the mailing list, visit the subscribe page.
User Groups
As well as the general mailing list, the Heurist Network also arranges a number of more specific user groups, focussed on particular areas of study. These user groups have their own private mailing list, and we also arrange workshops and events to address the particular needs of users in each group. Click the links below to join a user group.
Have a suggestion for a new user group? Contact us.
Heurist Book Historians
Heurist hosts numerous major book history databases. Book history is a challenging field for data-driven scholarship, because of the complexity of books as objects, and the complex interrelations between books and people, events, institutions and ideas. The book history group is a lively forum for the discussion of all such problems.
Explore Heurist’s book history projects ☞Heurist Librarians and Archivists
Heurist is increasingly the technology of choice for librarians, archivists and information scientists of all kinds. It provides a robust, flexible framework for managing collections and supporting internal projects. The Heurist Librarians and Archivists group is especially aimed at users to manage their own installations of Heurist, or who support Heurist users at their own institutions.
Explore Heurist’s museum, library and archive projects ☞ Explore Heurist’s infrastructure projects ☞Heurist Archaeolgists
Heurist has a long association with archaeology. It grew out of Minark, an archaeological databasing system programmed by Dr Ian Johnson in the 1980s. It was then hosted for many years in the Archaeological Computing Laboratory at the University of Sydney. Today, although Heurist has become a very general-purpose tool, hosting projects from all Humanities disciplines, it retains a strong community of archaeologists. Join the user group to help empower your data management and improve the publishability of your findings.
Heurist Asian Studies
As an Australian platform, Heurist has long hosted many pioneering projects in Asian Studies. Whether you study modern Chinese politics or Indonesian epigraphy, there is likely to be a fellow Heurist user with relevant expertise or an interest in your work.
Heurist Prosopographers
Humanities research is fundamentally about human beings. Scholars from many disciplines have turned to Heurist as a tool for recording information about particular human individuals, and Heurist comes pre-loaded with a range of features that make it very easy to get started with a new prosopographical database. The Heurist Prosopographers is a place to discuss what it means to transform human lives into data, with all the practical and ethical problems that entails.
Explore Heurist’s prosopography projects ☞