Biographies

Thursday 28 November, NewSpace, xG18 (ground floor):
Stylo Workshop

Professor Jan Rybicki
Jan Rybicki is Professor of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. With a background in English literary studies, comparative literature and literary translation, he has published on stylometry (incl. “The Great Mystery of the (Almost) Invisible Translator: Stylometry in Translation”) and authorship attribution (“Partners in Life, Partners in Crime?”). He has served the Digital Humanities community as EADH committee member and is now part of DARIAH-EU’s Scientific Advisory Board. He has also translated into Polish such authors as Golding, Gordimer, Fitzgerald, Ishiguro or le Carré.

Friday 29 November, NewSpace, x402 (4th floor):
Academic presentations

Professor Hugh Craig
Hugh Craig is the Director of the Centre for Linguistic and Literary Computing. He has been an advocate of computer-assisted analysis of language in literature since this controversial field began to emerge in the late 1980s. Craig’s research builds on the work of the Centre’s founder, Emeritus Professor John Burrows, who was the first to establish that simple function words such as “he”, “and”, “but” and “if” were rich in stylistic information when analysed using computational techniques. Craig has devoted decades of research to showing that statistics can help us analyse and appreciate literary texts. Some of his findings in Shakespearean drama remain contentious, while others have been widely accepted.

Dr Jennifer Debenham
Dr Jennifer Debenham is the Senior Research Assistant on the Colonial Frontiers Massacres Digital Map Project with the Centre for the History of Violence at University of Newcastle, Callaghan Campus. Her interests include mythology in history, representation, memory, gender, race and class in Australian and international history over a range of time periods. An anthropological understanding of historical issues steers the perspectives in her inquiry. Her current research considers the ways Aboriginal Australians have been represented on documentary film. She has also worked public signage projects for the City of Sydney and on corporate histories. Publications include The Australia Day Regatta, with Dr Christine Cheater, (2014) and online publication, Colonial Frontier Massacres in Eastern Australia, 1788-1872 with L. Ryan, W. Pascoe and M. Brown, (2017, 2018) https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map

Dr Hedda Haugen
Dr Hedda Haugen Askland is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at The University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia. She is the Project Director of the Centre for Social Research and Regional Futures and Deputy Director of the Centre for 21st Century Humanities. Through her research on Development Induced Displacement and Resettlement with mining affected communities in rural Australia, she investigates how mining, land use and land use change relate to place, power, displacement, home and exile. http://www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/hedda-askland

Dr Martínez Arranz
Dr Martínez Arranz holds a PhD in Policy Studies (Monash University) and has published in the lead journals on energy policy and sustainability. His interests include transitions in the energy and related sectors and new methods in transitions research, focusing on data-intensive approaches.

Ian McCrabb
Ian McCrabb is the founder and managing director of Systemik, a Sydney based IT consulting group focused on information architecture and content services in the corporate and government sectors. Since its establishment in 1994, he has led the design, development and commercialization of consulting methodologies, web technologies and content transformation services; adapting the organizations business models to map to evolving corporate web content management platforms and strategies. Ian has an MA in Sanskrit and Buddhist Studies from USYD and his PhD dissertation continues his focus on methodologies for the analysis of donative inscriptions and characterization of the ritual practice of relic establishment in ancient Gandhara (eastern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan). Ian is analyst/designer and project manager on the READ project and system designer of READ Workbench.

Dr Ann Hardy
Ann Hardy is Historian, Living Histories Co-ordinator at the University of Newcastle’s Cultural Collections GLAMˣ Lab (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums). She has a strong commitment to historical and archival research, collaborating with communities and cultural groups to develop new knowledge. She co-ordinates Work Integrated Learning (WIL) students on placement in the Lab. Projects undertaken in the Lab have a multidisciplinary focus, the most recent being the Deep Time project. Her key research areas are Newcastle’s ‘Coal River’, Australian ‘asylums’, health and welfare history, and has an interest in Aboriginal culture, rock art and the association between cultural heritage and well-being.

Gionni di Gravio
Gionni Di Gravio is University Archivist at the University of Newcastle, Chair of the Hunter Living Histories (formerly Coal River Working Party) and Councillor on the Australian Society of Archivists. Over the past twenty years he has used emerging and evolving technologies to connect people with historic records and archives across time and space. He is very committed to forging links across thousands of years of Aboriginal Australian culture and human expression in all its forms and formats with the aim of creating a new meta science; merging Renaissance western science with Aboriginal wisdom and connection to land, for a better future.

Gaute Rasmussen
Gaute Rasmussen is an expert in technology and software development. He has a background spanning computer consulting, video game development, creative media education, and innovation. His education is in computer science and creative industries. He currently works for the IT Innovation Team at the University of Newcastle, focussing on creating educational prototypes using cutting edge technology such as virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning, 3D scanning, and data visualisation.

Professor Victoria K Haskins (UoN)
Victoria K Haskins is a Professor of History at the University of Newcastle, and Director of the Centre for 21st Century Humanities, and the Purai Global Indigenous History Centre. She works on cross-cultural global histories of gender, labour and colonialism.

Ben Nagy
Ben Nagy worked for more than a decade as a software security researcher, before changing tack. In 2019, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Classics, Linguistics) from the University of Adelaide. Presently, he is an MPhil candidate at the same university, working on the application of computational methods to Latin poetry, with a particular interest in questions of style and authorship.

Professor Simon Burrows
Simon Burrows is Professor of History and Professor of Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University. He heads the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe project, which since its inception in 2007 has involved over 20 technologists and researchers and in 2017 won the ‘British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Digital Resource Prize’. His numerous publications include ‘Enlightenment Best-Sellers’ (Bloomsbury, 2019) and ‘Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Studies’ (forthcoming, Oxford Studies in Enlightenment, 2020), which he is co-editing with Glenn Roe.

Dr Erin McCarthy
Dr. Erin A. McCarthy is a digital humanist and literary historian specializing in the histories of reading and the book. She earned her Ph.D. in English with an interdisciplinary certificate in medieval and Renaissance studies at The Ohio State University in 2012. Since 2014, she has been a Postdoctoral Researcher on the European Research Council-funded digital humanities project ‘RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550–1700’ at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her research combines traditional scholarly methods, including bibliography, palaeography, and editing, with digital ones, such as coding, data visualisation, and quantitative analysis, to explore the material forms of early modern texts and the historical evidence these instantiations provide. She has published articles in the John Donne Journal, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, and the Review of English Studies. She is currently completing two books: Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press), which examines early modern publishers’ efforts to identify and accommodate readers of printed poetry; and The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing in Manuscript Miscellanies, 1550–1700, a joint-authored monograph on RECIRC’s methodology and findings. She recently held a Katharine F. Pantzer Jr. Fellowship in Descriptive Bibliography at Harvard University’s Houghton Library to begin work on her next major project, which creates digital tools and methods for the study of early modern English manuscripts.

Dr Gillian Arrighi
Dr Gillian Arrighi is Senior Lecturer in Creative and Performing Arts in the School of Creative Industries, University of Newcastle, Australia. She has been a researcher on the national AusStage project for 16 years. Her research concerning the late-Victorian heritage-listed Victoria Theatre in Newcastle (1891) has been rendered as an immersive Virtual Reality experience and in other visual formats. In addition to her on-going research commitment to AusStage, her primary research focus concerns popular entertainments of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has published thirty refereed journal articles and book chapters on circus, child actors, actor training, and applied theatre. She is Editor of the scholarly open-access journal, Popular Entertainment Studies (now in its tenth year of publication), co-editor of the books Entertaining Children: The Participation of Youth in the Entertainment Industry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and A World of Popular Entertainments (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars: 2012); editor of a focus issue on circus for Early Popular Visual Culture (2017); and author of the monograph The FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus: spectacle, identity and nationhood at the Australian circus (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2015). Dr Arrighi has been awarded international visiting fellowships at the Harvard Theatre Collection (2018) and the Harry Ransom Centre for the Humanities (2015), as well as the prestigious three-month National Library of Australia Fellowship (2017) to undertake research in support of her book project on child actors. She is the co-editor (with Jim Davis) of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Circus (due in 2020) and is in the final stages of writing her next monograph, on child actors working on professional stages in New York, London, Australia, and on Asia-Pacific touring routes, 1879-1914.
Dr Gillian Arrighi’s extended academic profile is available online at: https://www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/gillian-arrighi

Dr Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan (UoN)
Dr Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan is a Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. As both a researcher and a practitioner, she is interested in the many challenges raised by literary translation, especially the transfer of culture-specific items. She has been working on the translation of American and Australian crime fiction into French and the impact of the translator on the final text. She is currently investigating how Digital Humanities tools like Stylometry can help uncover the translator’s voice. https://www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/marie-laure-vuaille-barcan#publications

Dr Rebecca Beirne (UoN)
Rebecca Beirne is a Senior Lecturer in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle. She is the author of Lesbians in Television and Text after the Millennium, editor of Televising Queer Women, and co-editor of Making Film and Television Histories: Australia and New Zealand. Her current research follows two strands, the representation of individuals with mental health conditions in the media and also the use of digital humanities tools to investigate gender and sexuality in the media.

Saturday 30 November, NewSpace, xG18 (ground floor):
Public event

Professor Ray Siemens
Ray Siemens is Global Innovation Chair in Digital Humanities at U Newcastle, as well as Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria, Canada, in English and Computer Science, and past Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing; in 2019, he is also Leverhulme Visiting Professor at U Loughborough. He is founding editor of the electronic scholarly journal Early Modern Literary Studies, and his publications include, among others, Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities (2004, 2015 with Schreibman and Unsworth), Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2007, with Schreibman), A Social Edition of the Devonshire MS (2012, 2015; MRTS/Iter & Wikibooks, with Crompton et al.), Literary Studies in the Digital Age (2014; MLA, with Price), Doing Digital Humanities (2017; Routledge, with Crompton and Lane), and The Lyrics of the Henry VIII MS (2018; RETS). He directs the Implementing New Knowledge Environments project, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, and the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, recently serving as a member of governing council for the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as Vice President / Director of the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences (for Research Dissemination), Chair of the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions, and Chair of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations.

Dr Gillian Arrighi
(please see above)

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