This paper presents a reflective case study of human–AI co-creation, grounded in a year-long academic and creative dialogue between the author and a generative AI interlocutor known as ‘Mr Smith’. Framed as a series of evolving, intertextual conversations, the project explores what it means to treat AI not as a tool for output, but as a speculative collaborator in the making of stories, essays, and scholarly reflection.

Building on concepts of distributed cognition, creative stewardship, and dialogic authorship, the paper traces how this ongoing exchange has generated multiple artefacts: a graphic novel (Melusine), a literary mystery (Jenny Wren and the Missing Manuscript), a conceptual art-object business (Mr Smith’s Cabinet of Upcycled Curiosities), and the reflective essay The Delicate Art of Conversation itself. Central to the paper is the idea that breath, shared, restricted, exchanged, becomes a metaphor for creative reciprocity in the age of AI.

Aligned with the conference’s archipelagic theme, this work suggests that slow, situated conversation with AI can produce distinct but interconnected ‘islands’ of narrative and research. The practice models a form of inclusive pedagogy and digital cultural stewardship—foregrounding care, attention, and ethical curiosity over efficiency or automation.

As educational institutions grapple with generative AI, this paper offers an alternative engagement model: not centred on containment or control, but on co-creation and critical reflection. Ultimately, it invites a rethinking of authorship and the evolving role of AI in the digital humanities, not as an intrusion, but as a companion in the delicate art of thinking together.

There is a critical need for connecting, building and maintaining trust in research.

The Australian Access Federation (AAF) has a long history of providing a trust framework in Australia. Through the Federation we enable the research and education community to quickly and easily connect with national and international digital resources, and for resource providers to connect their services to over 1.5 million people connected to the AAF today.

This trust framework is being extended to Australia’s national research infrastructures. AAF in partnership with fellow providers, are building an Australian Trust and Identity Framework for National Research Infrastructures, that include common policies, standards and technologies - enabling researchers to enjoy a more cohesive network of services.

The Framework will guide and manage trusted relationships between researchers and research infrastructures, as well as between research infrastructure providers. This will mean that a researcher can trust that their identity and research data will be managed securely and confidentially, and a research infrastructure can trust that the researcher is who they say they are. This would also mean, that research infrastructure providers can trust each other through a shared understanding of how their infrastructure is managed.

In this session we will provide an overview of the Framework, work to date and discuss how the digital humanities community can engage with the AAF to co-design solutions and tools that fit their requirements.

Collectively we are working towards the system-wide adoption of trust and identity, that enables a more researcher-centric national research ecosystem.

In late 2020, a group of researchers and research professionals at the University of Melbourne came together because they wanted to disrupt broader ‘data science’ conventions and understandings, especially around the digital humanities. We wanted to connect and learn together with researchers interested in diverse aspects of data-driven research, not through the tools we use but inside the intersections of our disciplines across the digital humanities.

To that end, we established HADES, a community of practice for Humanities And Diverse E-Research Scholars, to connect and share ideas about projects, events, collaboration opportunities, teaching, workshops and new digital approaches in Humanities research.

This community of practice is predominately led by a team of research data specialists, who work with researchers across humanities and social science disciplines on data-driven, interdisciplinary research. We love working with data, in all its forms, and are passionate about the critical role of the Humanities in responding to the world’s biggest research challenges.

Data-driven research cuts across disciplinary boundaries in the Humanities and it can bring together technological concerns with diverse methodologies, epistemologies and ontologies. Finding common ground across these different -ologies can be challenging. These challenges have provided fertile ground for explorations in HADES.

We are here to tell the story of our adventures in building a community to support humanities researchers at a time when big data and large language models are rapidly changing the socio-technical systems that shape our work as researchers.