Category
Digital Scholarship
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Communication and Media Studies, Digital Scholarship, e-Research
Connecting and Enabling the Humanities
In today’s era of ubiquitous computing and global online connectivity, e-research is enriching research across a growing range of academic disciplines. Its reach is extending beyond the science and technology fields where it originated, and is now “penetrating the social sciences and humanities, [though] sometimes with differences in accent and label” (Jankowski, 2009). This chapter discusses some of the ways in which humanities researchers are embracing new digital resources, formats and modes of collaborating in ways that further the traditional goals of humanities research, “to better understand ourselves, our history, and our cultural heritage” (Cole, 2007). Topics covered in this chapter include the growing opportunities for collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches, building the information commons for public benefit, and the growing need for strategic investment in research infrastructure to support the humanities.
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Communication and Media Studies, Digital Scholarship, Historical Studies
Toward a Global Digital History
Digital history spans disciplines and can take many forms. Computer technology started to revolutionize the study of history more than three decades ago, and yet genres and formats for recording and presenting history using digital media are not well established and we are only now starting to see large-scale benefits. New modes of publication, new methods for doing research, and new channels of communication are making historical research richer, more relevant, and globally accessible. Many applications of computer-based research and publication are natural extensions of the established techniques for researching and writing history. Others are consciously experimental. This chapter discusses the latest advances in the digital history field and explores how new media technologies are reconfiguring the study of the past.
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Communication and Media Studies, Digital Scholarship, e-Research
eResearch Infrastructure for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Australian researchers are recognised internationally for delivering solutions to the most complex and challenging questions facing cultures and communities. Their contributions are vital to the nation’s social wellbeing. Encompassing the study of society, identity, economy, business, governance, history, culture and creativity, this broad field links universities, government agencies, collecting institutions and creative industries with policy development and with communities. However, complex issues of national and global significance cannot be solved in isolation. They demand collaborative approaches which in turn require the infrastructure to support them. Across all sectors, research practices are being fundamentally influenced by leading-edge ICT, and social and cultural data of immense significance is being generated in many different forms. With considerable investment worldwide in eResearch infrastructure, innovation in the humanities, arts and social sciences is increasingly dependent on enabling technology to support research excellence.
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Digital Scholarship, Historical Studies, Life Writing
Making Them Live
The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) is the premier reference resource for the study of the lives of Australians who were significant in Australian history. Its 50 year anniversary was celebrated in 2009 with a special symposium ‘Between the Past and the Future’, which brought together past employees of and contributors to this important national project. Seventeen volumes of the dictionary and one supplementary volume have been published under the Melbourne University Press imprint, with Volume 18 (covering people who died between 1981 and 1990, surnames beginning L to Z) due to appear in 2012. The editorial unit that produces the ADB has been led by General Editor Professor Melanie Nolan since 2008. In that year, the National Centre of Biography (NCB) was established at the Australian National University to extend the work of the ADB and to serve as a focus for the study of life writing in Australia, supporting the highest standards in the field, nationally and internationally.
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Cultural Studies, Digital Scholarship, Historical Studies
Gallipoli Online
At the heart of the national narrative in Australia is the potent and enduring story of the Australian and New Zealand soldiers—the ANZACs—who fought at Gallipoli, in Turkey, in the First World War, against impossible odds. It is a story that has taken on legendary significance. Each year, on the anniversary of the catastrophic Gallipoli conflict of 25 April 1915, there is a national holiday and Australians in ever-increasing numbers attend Anzac dawn services—conducted at memorials across the nation—to honour the dead of this and later wars. The role of the Gallipoli: The First Day website is not only to repeat and reinforce the Anzac message and make it more accessible, but also to offer a new assemblage of information utilising the 3D visual power of the digital environment.
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Communication and Media Studies, Digital Scholarship, e-Research
Virtual Strangers: e-Research and the Humanities
The Arts and Humanities have traditionally been worlds apart from Science and Technology in their ways of pursuing and generating knowledge and understanding. So much so that the famous term, ‘The Two Cultures’, coined in the mid twentieth century by C. P. Snow to describe the vast gap between these discipline areas, is still current and relevant.[i] It continues to dominate the organisation of disciplines in universities and drive the distribution of most national research funding. However, quite suddenly, at the end of the twentieth century, the digital environment began to trigger major changes in the knowledge economy, with the result that the humanities were thrown unexpectedly and involuntarily into a close relationship with technology. As one might expect in any forced marriage, it was not a case of love at first sight. In fact, the humanities have exhibited the full range of reactions—from totally ignoring the other, through unashamedly raiding their wealth, to wholeheartedly embracing the exciting future they seem to offer. Whatever the reaction, it is clear that the humanities are now inescapably entangled with technology, for better or worse, and the two cultures are connecting more than ever before, notably in the new research activities and spaces signalled by the term ‘e-research’.
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Digital Scholarship, Historical Studies, Museum Studies
Exhibiting History: The Digital Future
This paper surveys the digital history field, highlighting trends across historical, cultural and literary studies, heritage, archaeology and geography, as well as library information, screen and media studies, multimedia production and interaction design. This broad field is increasingly relevant to museum practice as museums experiment with digital modes of presentation and communication, including virtual exhibitions and other online extensions of the physical visitor experience.
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Digital Scholarship, Historical Studies
Participating in the Past
The profile of oral history research has grown dramatically over the past two decades. One of the reasons for this is that there has been a diversification of modes of public access and delivery. The increasing use of digital media means that oral histories are now reaching far greater audiences, and these histories are being presented in more direct, more stimulating and richer ways than have before been possible. In fact, the digital revolution is rapidly transforming history as a genre and set of practices, and oral history is a key player in this process. Because oral histories lend themselves to digital forms of delivery much more readily than conventional, text-only, representations of history, oral history has come to be a central focus for digital history researchers.
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Digital Scholarship, Historical Studies, Museum Studies
Digital Lives
The aim of the Interactive Histories research program is to seek ways of using interactive media for experimental content delivery in projects with a broadly historical focus. The focus to date has been on oral history projects (including virtual tours of heritage sites, museum installations and multimedia documentaries) and on theoretical research investigating emerging frameworks for historical representation enabled by interactive technologies. Planned projects include digital storytelling in local communities and the development of Indigenous and cross-cultural digital resources. Central to the two projects being presented here is the production of multimedia works designed to maximize public access to oral history material.
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Communication and Media Studies, Digital Scholarship, Historical Studies
Experimental Histories
Interactive digital technologies are transforming the processes of research and production across all major academic disciplines. The changes are most significant in traditional disciplines. In that of history, online public access to digitised historical resources has meant that the materials of history are now available to anyone who has access to the internet. Previously, the study of archives was only open to the dedicated specialist with access to the world’s major library collections. Digital technologies have not only enhanced access to resources, but they are also enabling the development and growth of new kinds of content delivery and new modes of historical narration. Although the book is not likely to be superseded any time soon, the book now competes with experimental digital works that are relating history in new and highly interactive ways.
about
Paul Arthur studied at the University of Western Australia and held research fellowships in Europe, North America and Australia before taking up the position of Deputy Director of the National Centre of Biography and Deputy General Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography at the Australian National University. He is inaugural President of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities, serves on the steering committee of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, the international executive council of centerNet and the executive committee of the International Auto/Biography Association, and is a member of the advisory board of the Australian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres. His forthcoming book, History and New Media, examines how technology is transforming knowledge of the past. Recent publications include Virtual Voyages: Travel Writing and the Antipodes 1605-1837 (2010), a history of European travel literature and cartography, and the edited volumes Recovering Lives (2011, Life Writing special issue) and Voices from the West End (2012, with Geoffrey Bolton). He is editor of the Anthem book series Scholarship in the Digital Age (Anthem Press, London and New York). Click here for Paul's CV.featured
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- Making Them Live
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