Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Historical Context; 1803-1920

June 18, 2010 at 6:54 pm · Filed under digital humanities, history

Founders and Survivors: Australian Life Courses in Historical Context; 1803-1920

Project report. Dr Craig Bellamy, VeRSI, June 2010

I recently attended a project workshop for the ARC funded Founders and Survivors project:  http://www.foundersandsurvivors.org Led by Professor Janet McCalman from the University of Melbourne, Associate Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart from the University of Tasmania, and an interdisciplary team of genealogists, demographers, and population health researchers; the project seeks to link the most important records about the convict system in Tasmania to uncover new knowledge about the system and the lives of the people within it.

The project — at a reasonably early stage—presented many of the interim results of digitising and parsing the data about the 72,500 convicts that were transported to Tasmania in the first half of the 19^th Century. The convict records in Tasmania are some of the most significant and detailed records of the lives, socio-economic position, bodies, and health of any group in the 19^th Century.  The project has the bold ambition of not only linking and analysing the convict records, but also linking other detailed institutional records; such as Australian military records, to gain a rich, intergenerational perspective of the health and lives of Australians.  No other settler society has such intimate details of its founding population.

In one of the earlier presentations, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart explained that the records are being digitised, analysed, and presented according to significant life events. These events include birthplace, upbringing, and trial, the voyage to Australia, the convict’s behaviour under sentence and their cause of death. Many convict records and registers have already been digitised and made available through the State Library of Tasmania and other institutions, but many hours are also being spent painstakingly transcribing muster records, pardon records, departures, absconders, apprehensions, certificates of freedom, and other records that ‘fill the gaps’ to assist in reconstructing the chain of events that make up the lives of the largely working class people who were transported to Tasmania. There are 456, 663 records recorded in the system so far.

Associate Professor John Bass, who is mainly responsible for liking the data, explained to me in a coffee shop in Salamanca Place in Hobart, how the records are linked, the decisions that are made in matching, linking, and the eventual historical analysis of the data. John has been involved in record linking projects for many years; primarily in the health sector (to such a degree that he was awarded an Order of Australia for his work). He explained how he searchers for a ‘linkage key’ (name, date of birth, etc.) from say, the records from a particular convict voyage and then matches this to other records of ‘arrival’ or ‘leave of pardon’ or ‘marriage’. It is not a purely scientific endeavour and the raw data is later used by the historian who will formulate this evidence into their broader historical arguments (and the data is held in separate databases and links stored separately). As Hamish Maxwell-Stewart explained in one of his presentations, matching rates are generally high at above 50% but some; as in matching ‘arrival’ with ‘death’ or ‘departure’ has been higher. Only about 20% of ‘arrival’ and ‘death’ records have been matched so far, but the samples have produced some remarkable results.

Hamish Maxwell-Stewart discovered some interim results from analysis of the surgeons’ sick-list on the very long, 4-6 month voyage the convict ships took to get to Tasmania. He graphed what diseases where prevalent at what stage of the voyage (scurvy, digestive system, fever etc.) and speculated upon the broader policy arrangements or period of the voyage that may have contributed to the disease.  An argument repeatedly made by many of the historians at the meeting was that as long as the convict survived the voyage, transportation may have extended their life expectancy as life in a penal colony in Tasmania may have been healthier than working-class life  in 19^th Century Britain.  However, Janet McCalman did stress the need to see results from the whole population first so that the sub-studies could be contextualised (and it isn’t good research practice to release results too soon as later results may contradict earlier results).

In 1834 at the age of 20, my great grandfather, Francis Fitzmaurice, was transported to Tasmania for stealing clothes. After a long history of well-documented recalcitrance in the convict system in Tasmania; being freed, having children, imprisoned, and freed again, he died of exposure to the elements on June 10, 1883.  I wonder if this is why I wear such large woolly jackets in the winter.

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Obama internet ‘kill switch’ proposed

June 18, 2010 at 4:37 pm · Filed under internet

US President Barack Obama would be granted powers to seize control of and even shut down the internet under a new bill that describes the global internet as a US “national asset”.

Local lobby groups and academics have rounded on the plan, saying that, rather than combat terrorists, it would actually do them “the biggest favour ever” by terrorising the rest of the world, which is now heavily reliant on cyberspace.

The proposed legislation, introduced into the US Senate by independent senator Joe Lieberman, who is chairman of the US Homeland Security committee, seeks to grant the President broad emergency powers over the internet in times of national emergency.

Titled “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act”, the bill stipulates any internet firms and providers must “immediately comply with any emergency measure or action developed” by a new section of the US Department of Homeland Security, dubbed the “National Centre for Cybersecurity and Communications” (from The Age link).

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Access TEI launched

June 18, 2010 at 10:36 am · Filed under TEI, digital humanities

From Professor John Unsworth, UIUC, on the CentreNet List

Those interested in digitizing text (whether printed or manuscript, in any language) will benefit from the AccessTEI program just launched by the Text Encoding Initiative, in partnership with Apex Covantage and with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The program provides bulk-pricing on the transcription and (structural) xml encoding of text, for those at institutions that are members of the TEI Consortium. A current list of institutional members is at http://www.tei-c.org/Membership/current.xml; if your institution is not a member, cost of membership varies from $100 to $5,000/year, depending on the size of the organization that is joining and the world economy in which it is located. Membership application can be found at http://www.tei-c.org/Membership/teimembershipform.pdf and pricing for AccessTEI services to TEI members can be found at http://accesstei.apexcovantage.com/Home/PriceMatrix .

John Unsworth

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Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values (part three)

June 17, 2010 at 4:25 pm · Filed under digital humanities

(A good blog post from Kathleen Fitzpatrick, an Associate Professor, Department of Media Studies, Pomona College, who has taken up the recent online debate on Open Access Publishing). Thanks to Larry Stillman for the link)

There’s a fascinating exchange around open access publishing and the reasons scholars might resist it developing right now, beginning with Dan Cohen’s post, Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values, which he wrote for the Hacking the Academy volume, a crowd-sourced book he and Tom Scheinfeldt are editing (to be published by the University of Michigan Press’s Digital Culture Books). Dan argues for the ethical — as well as the practical — imperative for contemporary scholars to publish their work in openly distributed forms and venues.

Stephen Ramsay then published a response, Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values (continued), in which he points out that the ways we substitute what we now understand as “peer review” for real evaluation and judgment by our peers, particularly at the stage of tenure and promotion reviews, so overwhelms this ethical/practical imperative that we never even really get to the stage of deciding whether publishing openly could be a good thing or not.

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Digital Humanities as an academic career path…

June 11, 2010 at 3:07 pm · Filed under digital humanities

Here is a reflective and well-argued post from  Dr Melissa Terras of UCL.  She is one of the Key Notes at this years Digital Humanities conference.

…but the point I am making is this. Our academic discipline does not have the same structure as traditional, more established ones. We do not have the obvious career progressions. We do not have the obvious tenure track. We do not have the obvious places to publish to guarantee that Nobel Prize. We are the academic magpies, the interdisciplinary scholars with one foot in the sciences and one foot in the humanities, creating our own “portfolio careers”. We are hacking our way through both fields, and creating – making – a space where we can talk about the need for, the use for, and the reason for the use of computational techniques in the humanities (whether to benefit the humanities or the computational sciences) (link)

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Developers Challenge @ ThatCamp London (Humanities and Technology camp)

June 10, 2010 at 12:47 pm · Filed under digital humanities

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Digital Humanities @ King’s

June 10, 2010 at 12:42 pm · Filed under digital humanities

The Digital Humanities conference starts at King’s College London on the 7th – 10th July. It promises to be an excellent event this year given the strength of the field at King’s and within the broader UK.  There are a number of events around the conference including half and fill day project workshops and there will also be a 2 day ‘un-conference’ called ThatCamp held on the Monday and Tuesday directly preceding the conference. I am going to another project workshop called HESTIA within Classics at Oxford, that is a very interesting project that has marked-up Herodotus’s the Histories in (conceptual) TEI and mapped the ancients understanding of place and time.

Directly after Digital Humanities at King’s is the highly innovative InterFace Symposium at the University of Warwick (July 15-16).  I won’t be going to this one but hope to see you at one of these events.

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