A few days before Christmas, Deb Verhoeven and I published an article in the Conversation on the latest funding crisis facing the National Library of Australia’s Trove service which included a visitor statistic: Trove boasts more than 22 million visits per year. Here we look at that number, and other usage stats, in more detail.
This is the text from a presentation I delivered as part of the History Australia roundtable discussion ‘Historians and the Archive: sacralization, democratisation, limits, and liberties,’ at the 2022 Australian Historical Association Conference (Deakin University, Geelong). The piece introduces my article ‘The temple of history: historians and the sacralisation of archival work.’
The following is based on a short presentation I gave at GLAMSLAM 2020, hosted by the Australian Centre for Public History, University of Technology, Sydney, on Friday, 6 March 2020. I have updated it based on recent events, and have adapted my slides and notes to produce a graphic blog post.
On Friday, 24 January 2020 I sent out a tweet asking people what they thought were the key digital humanities readings and projects every historian should look at. This post summarises their responses.
In late June 2019, Tristram Hunt wrote a piece for The Guardian: ‘Should museums return their colonial artefacts?’
Here I want to focus specifically on museum documentation, viewed through the lens of what is perhaps Hunt’s most problematic statement: “For a museum like the V&A, to decolonise is to decontextualise.” Any examination of museum artefacts online quickly reveals that, when it comes to metadata, missing context is a significant issue, and the concept of decolonisation a valuable part of the solution.
For as long as there have been museums some have been concerned by the lack of information available to the public. In 1784, William Hutton was aggrieved when he found the British Museum showed objects with no context, and little more than their names attached. This piece, based on a presentation given to the 2017 National Digital Forum in Wellington, NZ, argues that we need to work toward an expanded view of collection description and documentation, one which encompasses rich connectivity, relationality, and the complex structures required to represent contemporary understandings of collections-based knowledge.
This long read (c2700 words) is a version of the paper I gave at the CIDOC2017 Conference in Tbilisi, Georgia, on 26 September 2017.
Collections in large museums and archives are not uniformly documented. Museums Victoria (MV), in Melbourne, Australia, holds around 17 million items, including natural history specimens, history and technology artefacts, and Indigenous cultures, as well as archives and a library. Parts of the collections are rarely seen, let alone used. Documentation for some of these lesser items has changed little since the days of catalogue cards, the same data simply migrated from system to system for decades without being edited or updated.
On Saturday, 10 June 2017, I was invited to give the keynote at Oral History Victoria’s symposium ‘Oral history in a digital age’. This post is an edited version of that talk.
A little over a hundred years ago, the ethnographer and anthropologist Frances Densmore sat down with the Blackfoot chief, Mountain Chief. She was capturing Native American music and culture using a phonograph, a device already around 40 years old when this photograph was taken.
Stories in Stone: an annotated history and guide to the collections and papers of Ernest Westlake (1855-1922) by Rebe, Mike and Gavan McCarthy of the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre, makes available the digitised papers of Ernest Westlake, including those created during his journey to Tasmania in 1908-1910, when he collected over 13,000 stone tools.
Here are Rebe and Mike to tell the story of the archive and explain how two publications and two journeys became entwined.
The thing is about archives … they are the paydirt of history. Everything else is opinion. At a certain point you actually need documents. Germaine Greer, 20 February 2013 I am a product of 1990s academia, a reader of Judith Butler,… Continue Reading →
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