Paul Arthur » Internet

Toward a Global Digital History

Paul Arthur — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 01:16:14 +0000

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.

eResearch Infrastructure for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

Paul Arthur — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 01:00:22 +0000

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.

Making Them Live

Paul Arthur — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 11:39:37 +0000

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.

Gallipoli Online

Paul Arthur — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 11:42:20 +0000

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.

Trauma Online

Paul Arthur — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 01:42:52 +0000

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.

Virtual Strangers: e-Research and the Humanities

Paul Arthur — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 01:44:26 +0000

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’.

Digital Fabric, Narrative Threads

Paul Arthur — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 01:47:19 +0000

The traditional crafts of quilting, embroidering and weaving may appear to be a world away from the high tech fields of computer networking, digital interface design, and database development. However, the old and new are increasingly being linked through metaphors that reveal a great deal about changing attitudes to digital technologies as they become more established and widely accessible [...] Today’s communication networks are structured around “patchwork” designs, software glitches are fixed with “patches,” computer processors are being described as “multi-threaded,” and over the past decade other “material metaphors” have been embraced as a means of conceptualising and giving form to our new world of amorphous digital texts. In particular, the quilt motif has been used in a variety of ways, including as a means of visualising interaction and information flows and as a template for digital interface design.

Pixelated Memory

Paul Arthur — Sun, 25 May 2008 01:48:28 +0000

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.

Exhibiting History: The Digital Future

Paul Arthur — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:49:43 +0000

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.

Hypermedia History: Changing Technologies of Representation

Paul Arthur — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 02:01:22 +0000

Technologies of representation are not just instruments of recording and reporting. Their basic attributes determine what it is actually possible to conceptualise, capture and articulate. Photography, to take a classic example, transformed people’s outlook on the world because it could provide an unrivalled visual framing of actuality. It had no equivalent in the prior traditions of visual communication. Technological invention spurs social change. By focussing on ‘technologies of representation’ I am not only concerned with the technological means that underpin specific forms of representation, although these fundamentally define the range of options available, but also with the ways of seeing and understanding that they open up. Tomas describes these beautifully as “a new type of amniotic environment for vision”.