The online version of Volume 18 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which tells the life stories of hundreds of significant and celebrated Australians, will be launched tonight at The Australian National University. Featuring articles on 670 individuals with surnames from L to Z who died between 1981 and 1990, the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) presents a colourful mosaic of twentieth-century Australia. Included in the ADB are explorers, farmers, criminals, ballet dancers, speedway riders, and authors and politicians such as Patrick White, Christina Stead, William McMahon and Billy Sneddon. Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Young, who will officially launch the latest version of the online Dictionary, said that the stories and lives featured in the ADB illuminate major themes in our recent history. “A vast range of people are consulting the Australian Dictionary of Biography online – researchers, students at primary, secondary and tertiary level, genealogists, and people watching documentaries and historical dramas on TV,” he said. “Since going online in 2006, the ADB now attracts 70 million views a year.”
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.
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.
Hung parliaments at the Federal level in Australia are very unusual. The first such political stalemate since 1910 occurred at the onset of World War II. The Federal election of 21 September 1940 was held 70 years prior to the 2010 ballot that ultimately confirmed Julia Gillard as prime minister of a minority Labor government. The Australian Dictionary of Biography tells the story of the 1940 election that led to Robert Menzies being returned as Prime Minister of a minority coalition government—followed by its downfall the next year—through the lives and careers of the key political players. These included Prime Ministers Joseph Lyons, Robert Menzies, Arthur Fadden and John Curtin, along with the two conservative Victorian Independents, Arthur Coles and Alexander Wilson, who held the balance of power in the House of Representatives.
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’.
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.
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.
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”.
In this paper I discuss broad concepts that are at the centre of debates in the digital history field. The discussion ranges over four key concepts: digital interactivity, narrative, content and form. Digital interactivity is a shifting concept, the changes in its meaning directed by technological change. Narrative, which continues to be the primary mode for the telling of history, is gaining new meanings as interactive modes prompt the question of what can be considered ‘narrative’ and what cannot. Particular kinds of historical content lend themselves more readily to interactive representation, but to discuss this is to acknowledge that what counts as ‘history’ has been expanded immeasurably over the past decades. Finally, the many hybrid forms being utilised in the digital history field requires that new critical frameworks be developed to help theorise and differentiate those forms.
Paul Arthur is Vice-Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow and Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. He speaks and publishes widely on major challenges and changes facing 21st-century society, from the global impacts of technology on communication, culture and identity
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