The newly formed Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH) held its inaugural conference Digital Humanities Australasia: Building, Mapping, Connecting in Canberra, 26-30 March 2012. The event was the first major conference of its type in Australia, bringing together some of the leading figures in the digital humanities internationally and showcasing some innovative new research in Australia and New Zealand. The Keynotes included Julia Flanders, the Director of the Women Writers Project at Brown University in the US, Alan Liu, Professor of English at Santa Barbara University in the US, Professor John Unsworth, the CIO from Brandeis University in the US, and Professor Harold Short, the former Director and founder of the Department of Digital Humanities at Kings College London.
The conference was held in the splendid 1950s chic of the Shine Dome, owned by the Australian Academy of Science. The panel included a poster session to display emerging scholars’ new scholarship and a series of workshops led by some leading figures in text encoding and analysis, mapping, and book digitisation. The main conference sessions included Trends in digital scholarship modelling and open publishing and Teaching the digital humanities in Japan. Together, the interdisciplinary format of the program provided ample opportunity for participants to discuss and exchange some of their computing methods and critical insights developed within their fields.
The Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Australian National University, and VeRSI supported the conference, which partnered with the University of Melbourne Library to bring out one of the keynotes and provide much of the program management tools and expertise. The conference is a much-needed and long-overdue addition to Australian and New Zealand humanities research. It will be held roughly every two years as part of the long-term commitment of the aaDH.
More details can be found on the DH site: http://aa-dh.org/
Leave a Reply