Electronic Field Notebooks Pty Ltd (EFN) was founded in 2020 by current and former researchers from Macquarie University while they rebuilt the Field Acquired Information Management Systems (FAIMS) mobile platform in partnership with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and 19 institutional and business partners. The platform, now known as Fieldmark, was launched in December 2022. You can read more about the project here.
In 2023, EFN commenced offering hosting services for Fieldmark. The EFN Founders are committed to maintaining the open-source platform while meeting the needs of time-poor researchers requiring concierge services to design and deploy their electronic field notebooks and digital recording workflows.
Meet the Founders
Professor Shawn Ross
Shawn Ross is an archaeologist, ancient historian and leader in the field of digitally enabled research infrastructure. He is Director, Strategic Initiatives, Digitally Enabled Research and a Professor of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University. His research focuses on landscape archaeology, the history and archaeology of Greece and the Balkans, and research applications of information technology. He is currently seconded to the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) to lead development of a persistent identifier system for research activities. Shawn has directed or co-directed the Field Acquired Information Management Systems Project, better known as the FAIMS Project, from its beginning in 2012 and co-founded EFN Pty Ltd in 2020, now serving as its Director.
Associate Professor Steve Cassidy
Steve Cassidy is an academic computer scientist and has worked in areas relating to speech and language technology, research data management and data science over the last 30 years. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at Macquarie University. He has authored a number of Open Source software packages, in particular to support researchers working with large collections of speech and language data. Steve has served as Technical Lead for the FAIMS Project since 2020 is a co-founder of EFN Pty Ltd, driving the overall architecture of the system and ensuring that it meets customers’ technical needs.
Dr Brian Ballsun-Stanton
Brian Ballsun-Stanton is a technologist and researcher in the philosophy of technology. He is a Solutions Architect (Digital Humanities), at the Faculty of Arts, at Macquarie University. He has been the Technical Lead, Product Owner and Data Architect for the FAIMS Project since its inception in 2012, leading overall design of the product and supporting researchers around the world in customising data collection workflows. In his work with researchers at Macquarie University, he has specialised in data acquisition, transformation, and analysis. Brian is a co-founder of EFN Pty Ltd, and continues to champions users’ needs within the development team to ensure that Fieldmark is fit-for-purpose.
Dr Penny Crook
Penny Crook is a digital archaeologist and artefact specialist with expertise in managing large datasets and analysing historical artefacts of the modern world. As a consultant archaeologist for over 20 years, she has collaborated on a range of cultural heritage management projects in NSW, delivering practical outcomes and policy advice. She is the Principal of The Artefact Post. She has been a project coordinator, workflow designer, and user of FAIMS since its inception in 2012, and has co-directed the project since 2016. Penny is a co-founder of EFN Pty Ltd, and will lead project management and training and support, helping users to craft their workflows for field data capture.
Associate Professor Adéla Sobotkova
Adéla Sobotkova is a digital historian and landscape archaeologist who investigates the evolution of past settlements in their environmental context, with special focus on the rise and decline of social complexity and human–environment interactions. Adéla conducts pedestrian surveys during fieldwork in Bulgaria, Greece, New South Wales and Denmark. She is an expert in digital aggregation and streamlining of datasets for large-scale synthetic studies. She is an advocate of reproducible workflows and deep digital practice, and as a member of the Software Carpentries, teaches and promotes digital literacy. Her technical forte is open-source mobile field recording, data and software project management, and regional remote sensing for cultural heritage monitoring. Adéla has been a project coordinator, workflow designer, and user of FAIMS since its inception in 2012, and is a co-founder of EFN Pty Ltd.
