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Category
Historical Studies
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Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Virtual Voyages
Born out of an ancient geographical theory of balance, the term ‘antipodes’ was first used to refer to the vast uncharted underworld of the southern hemisphere from a northern perspective. The principle behind this belief, as described in the Quarterly Review in the nineteenth century, was ‘that all the land, which had till then been discovered in the southern hemisphere, was insufficient to form a counterpoise to the weight of land in the northern half of the globe’. The idea of the antipodes as a counterbalance, though now remembered only as a peculiar, discredited theory, has been surprisingly influential as an imaginative concept. An antipodean expectancy filled minds, maps, novels and utopian plans, laying the foundations for perceptions of Oceania and Australasia that continue to impact on how this part of the world is seen from a distance as well as from within. The region of the antipodes has been occupied by European settlers and their descendants for a relatively short time. And yet, this brief period is set against a backdrop of one of the longest recorded histories of imagining prior to geographical discovery.
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Communication and Media Studies, Historical Studies, Life Writing
Digital Biography
This paper reflects on an emerging field that has no accepted name or boundaries but is described here as “digital biography.” The activities, formats, and genres associated with this field are rarely linked with life writing or traditional biographical studies. Rather, this field is seen as the domain of those concerned with digital privacy, copyright, data preservation, and identity management. Over the past decade or so, critics in various disciplines, mainly legal studies, information management, multimedia design, and IT development, as well as sociology, psychology, and marketing, have focused on the complexity of online identity. Though online identity has become such a significant focus of attention in these disciplines, few who study biography have discussed it. Indeed, as Nigel Hamilton points out, biography itself has had less attention than one might expect for a field that “has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years”, a field that, according to Carl Rollyson, is widely recognized as “the dominant non-fiction of our age”.
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Cultural Studies, Historical Studies, Life Writing
Trauma Online
This article considers how traditional physical memorials to war and other catastrophic events differ from online memorials in the Web 2.0 environment and it asks what the benefits and drawbacks of each may be. There has always been an awkward fit between the public statements embodied in monuments to those who died in war and the personal stories told by individuals who returned. This disjuncture serves to demonstrate that the two ways of remembering traumatic events—the collective and the individual—have traditionally been poles apart and often contradictory. Gradually, over the past two decades, with the increasing influence of critical theories that have questioned national and other dominating discourses—and also with growing interest within the field of clinical psychology in what is now labeled post-traumatic stress disorder—there has been an increasing interest in the vast underlayer of personal stories that national narratives have shut out or silenced.
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Communication and Media Studies, Historical Studies, Life Writing
Saving Lives: Digital Biography and Life Writing
In this first decade of the twenty-first century we are caught up in the midst of a technological shift of the kind that Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, attributed to the increasing popularity of photography in the early twentieth century. The essence of that change was the unprecedented capacity to create infinitely reproducible multiple copies. For the first time the idea of the primacy of the singular work of art was seriously open to question. ‘The history of every art form,’ writes Benjamin, ‘shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, a new art form’. Photography initiated a change that Benjamin recognised as being as profound in its impact on people’s lives as the introduction of the printing press.
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Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Fictions of Encounter
The “imaginary voyage” was an early form of the modern realist novel popular in Britain and France from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, set predominantly in the region of Australasia and the Pacific. As a branch of travel literature, it was linked intimately to the expansion of empire. Through repeated stories of successful colonizing schemes and heroic accounts of cross-cultural encounters between European travelers and the people of the antipodes, these texts allowed European readers to enjoy farfetched fantasies of colonization well before, and during, the period of actual colonial expansion. As in the case of the many better-known examples of literary fiction produced in the later period of European imperial dominance, imaginary voyage fiction helped embed social acceptance of colonial expansion by modeling cultural domination as natural, beneficial, and welcome.
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Historical Studies, Literary Studies, Postcolonial Studies
Teaching and Learning Guide: Antipodean Myths Transformed
Sample Syllabus:
Week 1: Introduction and Overview—Exploration and Colonisation of the Great South Land
- - The myth of the antipodes—the allure of the great south land
- - Gaps in maps—spaces for the imagination
Weeks 2–4: Fantasies of the Antipodes
- - The role of imaginary voyage texts—blending reality with fantasy, pre-programming colonisation
- - Myths of extreme difference
- - Myths of Indigenous populations’ welcoming attitude to colonial intrusion
- - Theories of otherness
Weeks 3–5: Entering the Antipodes
- - Early explorers’ contradictory responses to Terra Australis Incognita
- - Utopias and dystopias
- - First contact with Indigenous people—the concept of ‘terra nullius’ framed by myths
Weeks 6–8: Images of Contemporary Australia: Enduring Myths
- - The myth of terra nullius and the impact on Indigenous Australia
- - The ‘dead heart’ of Australia as the last unfathomed antipodean space
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Communication and Media Studies, Historical Studies, Life Writing
Pixelated Memory
War memorials are the most familiar and visible means of acknowledging and respecting the trauma of large scale, violent conflict. In practically every town in Australia, however small, monuments to war are found. These are haunting, poignant reminders of the brutality of war and the fragility of life. And yet, their reassuring solidity and prominence shields us from the reality of lost lives and suffering by casting war in terms of abstract and stylised notions of heroism, loyalty, sacrifice and glory. While it is usual for the names of the dead to be listed on these monuments, their individual suffering is blended, ritualised and distanced in a symbolic and generalised tribute. It is not surprising then that there has always been an awkward fit between the public statements made by these monuments and the personal stories told by individuals who returned.
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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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about
Paul Arthur studied at the University of Western Australia and has held fellowships in Europe, North America and Australia. He worked in research positions at Murdoch University (1999-2006) and as a Research Fellow at Curtin University (from 2007) 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 in 2010. He serves as inaugural President of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities, and is a member of the NeCTAR project board, the steering committee of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, the international executive council of centerNet, the executive committee of the International Auto/Biography Association, and 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 cultural 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 founding 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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- Connecting and Enabling the Humanities
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