Colonial girls' literature and the politics of archives in the digital age

In this paper we examine the politics of print and digital archives and their implications for research in the field of historical children's literature. We use the specific example of our comparative, collaborative project 'From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Australian, New Zealand and Canadian Print Cultures, 1840-1940' to contrast the strengths and limitations of print and digital archives of young people's texts from these three nations. In particular, we consider how the failure of some print archives to collect ephemeral or non-canonical colonial texts may be reproduced in current digitising projects. Similarly, we examine how gaps in the newly forged digital "canon" are especially large for colonial children's texts because of the commercial imperatives of many large-scale digitisation projects. While we acknowledge the revolutionary applications of digital repositories for research on historical children's literature, we also argue that these projects may unintentionally marginalise or erase certain kinds of children's texts from scholarly view in the future.

Forgotten histories: ephemeral culture for children and the digital archive

The history of children’s popular culture in Australia is still to be written. This article examines Australian print publication for children from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, together with radio and children’s television programming from the 1950s to the 1970s. It presents new scholarship on the history of children’s magazines and newspapers, sourced from digital archives such as Trove, and documents new sources for early works by Australian children’s writers. The discussion covers early television production for children, mobilising digital resources that have hitherto not informed scholarship in the field.

The man who mistook Marat for Sade: 'living' memory and the video archive

Digital video archives, which are growing at an exponential rate, will become increasingly important to Theatre History and Performance Studies, and questions of how scholars negotiate the relationships between memory, technology and performance events in theoretical and practical terms will become crucial. Indeed, there is already a considerable body of scholarly material on this topic. This article considers these questions with specific reference to the relationship between video records deposited in digital archives and human memory. First and foremost, this article raises questions about the authority of the archive and the ways in which archival technologies, in the words of Maaike Bleeker, 'transform how we remember, how our and others' memories are entangled in the here-and-now, and, in the end, even how we think and imagine'.

Centenary celebrations: reinterpreting acting in mothers of France on-line

How is performance on early film newly legible in the digital archive? What implication does this hold for our understanding of film history, especially for our understanding of the actress and her role in the nascent film industry? Taking Sarah Bernhardt’s 1917 film,Mothers of France, as my case study, I join the Women Film Pioneers Project in exploring the digital archive as a necessary tool in feminist film historiography. I argue that the digital archive reconfigures Sarah Bernhardt as an actress who was important not just to the nineteenth century stage but also to the development of the feature film and to its use as a propaganda tool in the Allied war effort. While digital archives such as The European Film Gateway contain a wealth of material about the Great War, Bernhardt’s film reminds us that the digital archive is also an interpretative and critical tool in the re-reading of acting in silent film.

Editors’ introduction: archives and archivists

Today, questions about online access to media history, digital research infrastructure, and cultural and political pedagogy have come to the fore. A host of related questions has acquired a new urgency: What is lost and gained in the shift from physical to digital archiving? What and how do archives preserve, and how do they curate public access? How do we search for digital material? Which tools are used to modify and limit our search options, and what does this tell us about digital networks and our relationships to them?

Digital ubiquity in the Anthropocene : the non-anthropocentric anthropology of Massimo Canevacci

The work of Massimo Canevacci is undoubtedly one of the most compelling examples of transdisciplinary thinking when applied to the interdisciplinary effort of expanding the boundaries of a discipline. His work engages with geography, art, technology, media, psychology, etc – a true kaleidoscope of perspectives. The synapses created by the transversal connections he makes across a multiplicity of epistemologies are catalytic. To follow the logical itinerary created by his scholarly inquiry is to be taken on a journey that leaves none of our pre-conceptions untouched.

2014 Australian Association for Research in Education presidential address: educational research and the tree of knowledge in a post human digital age

The 2014, 41st Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) presidential address is both inspired and guided by the discursive genres of presidential addresses and the role of the president in a member association such as AARE. In the address, typically the president speaks to the members on an issue or issues that are to shape or conclude their term of office, as it is in my case. Like many of the 40 AARE presidents who have gone before me, I will embed some things that are professional, personal and political—not in the interests of advancing my research agenda, but to add ‘‘to the weave and pattern of the association’s history’’ (Reid 2010, p. v). Threads of my research since completing my PhD in 2000 will appear to support the broad argument. Also, I will draw on the outcomes of the 2014 Australian Research Council Discovery round (see Australian Research Council: ARC archives 2016) to encapsulate my key argument that educational research and its (ex)changes are being reshaped: in a post human digital age, the tree of knowledge is mutating. To make my argument, I will review how the thinking and doing of educational research mid-way through the second decade of the twenty-first century is constructed and ask what research endeavours might be created to make the best possible worlds for our member community and the aspirations of the association.