My first web page from 1995 (snapshot 1998)

During the past two decades, the Internet and its applications have become one of the richest sources of bibliographical information available to scholars. Through email lists, web-pages, blogs, video and sound-recordings, and publications in various guises, the traces of one’s online life on line can be rich and varied.  At perhaps no other time in history has there been so much recorded information about individuals, both public and private; often kept in perpetuity in the darkest anterooms of the web.

But finding information in the ‘dark-web’ isn’t always an easy task and requires a series of techniques and investigative scenarios to assist more contemporary bibliographical studies.  Perhaps surprising, a large amount of deleted web-page, blog post, and video can be recovered and studied through the use of various online archives, searching, and forensic techniques. As someone who has been active online for 17 years, the traces of one’s online life can reveal the centrality of the medium to significant life narratives; that are often both challenging and embarrassing. These sources can be used to embellish bibliographical narratives when coupled with other analogue and oral sources and have become a vital component of bibliographic investigations.

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.

Professor Graeme Davidson

‘Narrating the nation’

Professor Carl Bridge, Director of the Menzies Centre

Dr Ian Henderson, Lecturer at the Menzies Centre and his partner Kwesi.

“The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone,” by Joseph Wright, 1771

Dan Edelstein, a Stanford French professor, has been exploring an aspect of the Age of Enlightenment that is less familiar to most, the so-called “dark side” of the enlightenment. He described the differentiating factors. “The prevailing understanding of the enlightenment is one in which there was only scientific and rational thinking, but there was also a significant number of people contributing to the enlightenment who were absorbed in dubious scholarly pursuits like alchemy, mythology, astrology and secret societies.”(link)

These ‘dubious scholarly pursuits’ are still with us. ‘Web 2′ perhaps?

The JISC-funded A Vision of Britain Through Time website launches today,
giving access, often for the first time, to over two centuries’ worth of
facts, figures, surveys, maps, election results and travel writing showing
how 15,000 UK places have changed.

The changing story of Britain’s towns and villages can be explored in new
depth online, which unites more than 200 years worth of official documents,
maps and travel stories. http://vision.port.ac.uk/

(The Harley Davidson ‘Heritage’. A legendary synthesis between science and heritage )

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) are taking forward a joint £8.1m programme entitled Science and Heritage to support leading-edge research which will explore new ways to understand the cultural and physical nature of heritage and to prepare society for the challenges that cultural heritage will face in the 21st Century.

As part of this Science and Heritage programme, AHRC and EPSRC are offering Post-doctoral Fellowships to enable outstanding early career researchers to establish independent research careers in heritage science. Potential candidates should have up to, but no more than the equivalent of five years’ post-doctoral experience. The fellowships will be for a duration of three years full time (up to 5 years part time) and will primarily cover the salary costs of the Fellow, travel and subsistence and consumables.

Funding is available to support between four and six Post-doctoral Fellowships.

AHRC is administering this call on behalf of AHRC and EPSRC.

The deadline is 4pm Thursday 10 September 2009
Further Information:

More details can be found on the AHRC website

(Roy Rosenzweig is the founder of the Centre for History and New Media at George Mason University in the US. The centre is progressive in both its approach to history and technological innovation. This fellowship may be of interest to you budding digital humanists out there).

In 2009, George Mason University and the American Historical Association will offer the first Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History. This award was developed by friends and colleagues of Roy Rosenzweig (1950–2007), Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History and New Media at George Mason University, to honor his life and work as a pioneer in the field of digital history.

This nonresidential fellowship will be awarded annually to honor and support work on an innovative and freely available new media project, and in particular for work that reflects thoughtful, critical, and rigorous engagement with technology and the practice of history. The fellowship will be conferred on a project that is either in a late stage of development or which has been launched in the past year but is still in need of further improvements. The fellow(s) will be expected to apply awarded funds toward the advancement of the project goals during the fellowship year.

In a 1-2 page narrative, entries should provide a method of access to the project (e.g., web site address, software download), indicate the institutions and individuals involved with the project, and describe the project’s goals, functionality, intended audience, and significance. A short budget statement on how the fellowship funds will be used should be attached. Projects may only be submitted once for the Rosenzweig Fellowship.

The entry should be submitted by e-mail to rosenzweigprize@historians.org. Questions about the prize and application process should be directed to rtownsend@historians.org. The deadline for submission of entries is May 15, 2009. Recipients will be announced at the 2010 AHA Annual Meeting in San Diego (link to original post).

The Virtual Museum of the Pacific (VMP) is a Rich Internet Application with a Web Services architecture used to manage and navigate 400 objects from the Australian Museum’s (http://www.austmus.gov.au/) Pacific Island collections. This project tests a new means of facilitating access for Indigenous people and researchers to museum-based digital collections whose artefacts are physically distributed and often not on public display. The project has two dimensions: at the technical level the focus is on leveraging metadata used in curatorial management to produce a Web-based content management system for representing collection resources as a dynamic associative network; at a museological level the focus is on studying the effective means of presenting and interacting with this semantic network for traditional owners, the general public, researchers and curators (link)

Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) Project

This major new project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and located in the Department of History at the University of Essex, in collaboration the UK Data Archive. In conjunction with key commercial partners, the project will create an enhanced census data collection for Great Britain covering the period 1851 to 1911. An experienced manager is now being sought to play a leading role in this high-profile, path-breaking project.

The postholder will be responsible for co-ordination of the project and ensuring that the project plan is carried out successfully and is delivered on time and on budget. This will include oversight of both financial and staffing issues as well as the effective promotion of the project. They will also be responsible for liaison with national shakeholders, including the funder and commercial partners; organisation of user consultation workshops and Advisory Board meetings; and contributing to the writing of outreach materials and guides, as appropriate.

Applicants must have previous management experience with a working knowledge of project management techniques. Excellent communication, organisation and problem solving skills are essential.

Appointment to this full-time post will be for a fixed term to March 2011 in the first instance.

Please use the link below for a full job description, person specification and further information relating to this post.

Ref SS744
Salary: £36,532-£37,757 per annum

http://gs12.globalsuccessor.com/fe/tpl_essex01.asp?newms=jj&.