Symposium Abstracts

Hugh Craig (UoN)
Digital Humanities in Newcastle: past and future

This story starts with the pioneering work of John Burrows on the novels of Jane Austen and continues with publications by Burrows and others on plays, poems and non-fictional prose, and in many periods and languages, up to the present day. In my talk I will discuss some highlights and point to the hallmarks of stylometry at Newcastle – simple and robust statistical methods, many of them Newcastle innovations; close attention to literary qualities, and to the interactions of statistics and literary interpretation; and simultaneous interest in authorship attribution and in the “criticism” that can arise from “computation”. I will also discuss recent published and unpublished work featuring new methods attempting a closer modelling of the dynamics of literary language.

Jennifer Debenham (UoN)
Colonial Frontier Massacres Map

This project is led by Professor Lyndall Ryan. This is an interactive online map that documents massacres that occurred in Australia from 1788-1960 and stemmed from an ARC funded project investigating ‘Violence on the Australian Colonial Frontier’. Stages one and two of the project are complete and document over 250 massacres. Stage three will include Western Australia, extend the time period to 1960 and bring the map up to at a stable state of completion. This project will fund further research needed to uncover the full extent of the violence on Australia’s colonial frontier, with the final tally of massacres expected to be twice the amount so far

Alfonso Martínez Arranz (Deakin University) and Hedda Haugen Askland (UoN)
Enabling Broader Low-Carbon Coalitions: Digital Data Mining Methodology

Visions of the future of energy technology vary significantly within and across societies, both among experts and among the public. More often than not, such visions are driven by ‘hypes’ around a particular technology, be it carbon capture and storage (CCS), long-distance electricity interconnectors or microgrids (Martínez Arranz 2015, 2016; Zervos, Lins and Muth 2010). With anthropogenic climate change calling for urgent action and a move away from a fossil-fuel dependent energy sector to renewables or low-carbon intensive technologies, it is important to gain a better understanding how such visions are created, circulated and gain momentum.

In this paper, we will present some initial findings and reflections from an ongoing pilot study that seeks to develop a new methodology for mapping and understanding so-called advocacy coalitions as they relate to distinct energy futures. In the paper, we will explain the concept of advocacy coalitions and its usefulness for understanding how energy projects are tied to ideological battles and we will illustrate how these play out within online domains. We will present a preliminary map of the advocacy coalitions shaping the energy debate, explain the digital methodology we have developed in order to study these coalitions, and the implications this may have for advancing insight into energy contestation and debate at global, national and local levels.

Ian McCrabb (READ workbench)
Research Output integration

The presentation will outline the Research Output Integration (ROI) framework and demonstrate its efficacy with case studies based on Gāndhārī Buddhist texts and inscriptions. ROI is a strategic architecture implemented at the University of Sydney (USYD) with which to:
• develop research outputs in domain centred research enterprise platforms (REP),
• integrate the research outputs from those REP’s, and
• publish integrated research as digital journal articles.

Research Enterprise Platform
The Research Environment for Ancient Documents (READ) platform is categorized as a REP as its scope encompasses the core research workflows and outputs of an entire scholarly discipline: the philological analysis of manuscripts and inscriptions. READ Workbench is a management framework and self-service portal which supports the integration and management of researchers, resources, tools and processes in the collaborative development of textual corpora. It delivers philological research capability, configured for individual projects, as software as a service (SaaS). The strategy adopted was to build a cluster of capability around the REP to provide consulting and support services to projects and partner institutions. This approach builds in cost recovery to support the ongoing maintenance of the SaaS REP.

Digital Publishing Platform
A digital publishing platform (DPP) might be understood to encompass two distinct but integrated fields of capability: digital publication management and digital publication delivery. USYD supports the Open Journals System (OJS) platform as a framework for governance and management of the collaborative editing of peer reviewed digital journals, for indexing and bibliographic integration, and for institutional engagement. USYD supports WordPress/Plesk as a SaaS platform for research websites. WordPress provides a flexible Content Management System (CMS) framework for the integration of research outputs from domain specific REP’s and the design, development and delivery of digital publications.

Research Output Integration
The ROI framework integrates research outputs within the DPP rather than attempting to integrate REP’s as they have domain specific stakeholders, cultures, methodologies and workflows which resist close alignment. The architecture for integration within the digital publication delivery platform, WordPress, is implemented with REP plugins and API’s. Digital publication sites may be rapidly developed to research and domain specific publication requirements. As a ubiquitous Open SaaS platform, investment in WordPress is secure, and indeed transferrable, to other PHP frameworks. The investment in REP plugins, driven by individual research projects, is shared as a library of Open Source connectors.

READ Workbench Case study
The presentation will include a demonstration of READ Workbench: an exemplar if a REP with workflow and research output support for an entire scholarly domain. The presentation will conclude with a demonstration of the digital edition developed in WordPress which integrates research output from READ Workbench.

Gionni di Gravio, Gaute Rasmussen and Ann Hardy (UoN)
Visualising Deep Time in context using accessible and emergent technologies: The GLAM sector experience

This presentation discusses the collaborative work of the University of Newcastle’s IT Services’ Innovation Team and the university library ’s Cultural Collections and the GLAMx Living Histories Digitisation Lab to create a heritage visualisation project; Deep Time. The collaborative process facilitates a diversity of ‘voices’ around heritage in the digital age by taking a digital and information technology, and GLAM (Galleries Libraries Archives and Museums) perspective. The technical side of the project is discussed, including creating the 3D model of an Aboriginal archaeological site and custom virtual reality (VR) software for the project. The case study relies strongly on archival and historical aspects to interpret cultural sources for application to digital formats such as virtual reality (VR), exploring processes that document the projects and specific technical detail such as 3D modelling and texturing. The collaborative process also involved the wider community and work integrated learning (WIL) students and volunteers in the GLAMx Lab. They assisted with the digitisation of archives, objects and documentation. The wide approach (professionally and academically) that these case studies take contributes to digital humanities research because the project demonstrates how innovative technologies and the GLAM sector can add value to visual heritage digital reproductions and contextualisations.

Professor Victoria Haskins (UoN)
Replica Archive

Digital technology and the internet are revolutionizing the way we do history. Archives that were once practically inaccessible without incredible resources of time and money are now open – or potentially open – to anyone in the world with an online connection. Where historians once laboriously transcribed the documents held within the archives, or lugged home piles of paper photocopies, we now can capture and save them almost instantaneously, with nothing more sophisticated or heavy than a smartphone. These technological advances have made historical research possible to an extent unimaginable even ten years ago. But how do these changes in practice affect the histories that are produced by such practices? In this paper I reflect on my own experiences as a historian in the digital age, and my creation of what I call a ‘replica archive’ to draw from in my work. I will look at how the process of constructing this replica archive and then drawing upon it has impacted upon my historical writing, and offer some thoughts on how digital technology changes our relationship to the archives, shifting the way we think about history and our role as historians.

Simon Burrows (Western Sydney University)
Policing the French Book Trade on the Eve of the Revolution: Digital Evidence for the Effectiveness of Prohibition

For half a century, since the publication of Habermas’s seminal ‘The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere’, historians of the eighteenth century have been transfixed by the idea of that the period saw the rise of a rational critical public which, in political terms, swept all before it. Equally, historians of old regime France have depicted a country flooded with subversive illegal works from abroad, ranging in content from high philosophy through to smutty political pamphlets which supposedly desacralized the monarchy and contributed to its downfall in the revolution of 1789.

In this paper I will look at a variety of evidence gathered through digital surveys of the book trade that turn this view on its head. It appears to show conclusively that in the final decades before the revolution, the monarchy was increasingly able to control subversive print products and in fact succeeded in squeezing the supply chains through which they were created and circulated, bankrupting key actors in the process and driving them from the literary marketplace. Thus, in a conclusion which echoes Alfred Cobban’s famous demolition of the Marxist interpretation of the revolution, the revolution was a product (or emerged from) not of a rising public sphere, but a declining one. The revolutionaries commitment to freedom of expression was a reflection of weakness not strength, as was the ease with which such freedom was extinguished – using old regime tactics – by the Jacobins in 1792-4 and Napoleon a few years thereafter.

Ben Nagy (University of Adelaide)
Memento Metiri: Taking the measure of metre as a stylometric feature for Latin hexameter

The problem with poetry is that there just isn’t enough of it. This is, I claim, true in general, but more particularly in the case of digital methods for stylometry and authorship attribution. The broader field of prose stylometry is having great success in applying variants of Burrows’ Delta to word-counts and n-grams, but as Eder (2007) notes, working with these ‘low frequency events’ requires samples in the order of two to five thousand words. My present research concerns the authorship of the Aldine Additamentum, which is a small (81 lines, ~500 words) section of a much longer poem by the first century Latin author Silius Italicus. However, by focusing on features that are specific to poetry, the challenge of such a small sample became an opportunity. This paper demonstrates that metre is an efficient indicator of authorial style in classical Latin hexameter poetry. Using only metrical features, I performed pairwise classification experiments between 5 first-century authors (10 comparisons) using four different machine-learning models. The results showed a two-label classification accuracy of at least 95% with samples as small as ten lines and no greater than eighty lines (at most ~500 words). Additionally, these techniques seem viable for authorship attribution. An analysis of the disputed Aldine Additamentum concludes (p=0.0012) that the metrical style differs significantly from that of the rest of the poem. These techniques can certainly be extended to other Latin metres, and (most likely) to problems in Ancient Greek hexameter.

Reference:
Eder, M. (2017). Short samples in authorship attribution: A new approach. Pp. 221-4 in Digital Humanities 2017: Conference abstracts. Montreal: McGill University

Erin McCarthy (UoN)
Digital Humanities pedagogies

This paper will recount the process of developing a generalist undergraduate elective in digital humanities. What concepts and tools might undergraduates use, and how? What are the most important learning outcomes? In other words, what do we hope to achieve by introducing undergraduate students to digital research? This paper will draw upon recent scholarship in the field to reflect on current course offerings at UON.

Gillian Arrighi (UoN)
Retrieving Newcastle’s Theatrical Past: AusStage and the digital humanities

From very modest beginnings nineteen years ago as an index of theatre productions based in South Australia – long before the term ‘digital humanities’ had currency – AusStage is now recognised globally as the ‘gold standard’ for open access records of live performance, with ‘broad application’ for ‘reshaping the way we think about preserving, examining, and cataloguing performance ephemera’ (Caplan 2015: 357-58). A massive relational database of events, links and related resources, AusStage provides an open gateway to live performance records in Australia, from 1789 through to 2019. On all measures of research productivity – scholarly and creative output, data aggregation, network accessibility, social engagement and impact – AusStage’s record of collaborative research is outstanding, having forged partnerships with eighteen Australian universities, the Australia Council, the Performing Arts Heritage Network of Museums Australia, major theatre companies, the UK Association of Performing Arts Collections, and Centre for Ibsen Studies (University of Oslo). Also discoverable through Trove in partnership with the National Library of Australia, users range from professors to early career researchers, government agencies to performing arts companies, professional performers to school students. Funded by the ARC and multiple university partners, the database holds information on 105,600+ events, 147,700+ artists, 16,100+ companies, 10,300+ venues, 17,700+ works and 65,200+ resources (growing weekly). Following the most recent national research undertakings to visualize Australia’s ‘lost theatres’ through digital means (2018-19), this paper briefly recounts the University of Newcastle’s research undertakings under the aegis of AusStage, including engagements with geo- and time-coded mapping, analysing data, and interrogating relationships, then looks forward to ‘going virtual’ in the next research phase, when user experience and user accessibility will be foremost for developing the data architecture.

References and online links:
Debra Caplan. “Notes from the Frontier: Digital Scholarship and the Future of Theatre Studies.” Theatre Journal 67, no. 2 (2015): 347-359. https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed August 25, 2019).

AusStage: www.ausstage.edu.au

Victoria Theatre, Newcastle 1891, prototype visualisation with narration and historic sonification (music): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv41uwKRIkM&t=4s

Victoria Theatre, Newcastle 1891, virtual reality flythrough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npyfXepVcHg&t=4s

Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan and Rebecca Beirne (UoN)
Cross-cultural media coverage of the #metoo movement

As the hashtag metoo started to spread throughout the world, another hashtag was created in France, Balance ton porc, “denounce your pig” in English translation. It had quite a different tone than #metoo, putting the focus on accusation rather than solidarity. As a consequence there was a polemical reaction, most famously in the actor Catherine Deneuve’s opinion piece in Le Monde. Through a language based analysis of both French and Australian national newspapers, we will trace the cultural differences that resulted in a unique response in France.