Centre for 21st Century Humanities Newsletter - August

WEB VERSION

Welcome to our August newsletter

This month we celebrate a large grant for a Centre for 21st Century Humanities partnership which is working towards making research more accessible, and feature these items which highlight our researchers latest efforts in understanding humanity:

Research that brings to life the experiences of the world's first travelling global domestic workers
Podcasts featuring Professor Lyndall Ryan and Dr Justin Ellis
A survey to inform research into understanding our energy future
An examination of the language of disaster today and in the past
A virtual exhange that is giving students new perspective during COVID-19
History Week events in Newcastle
A call for papers for an edited collection on digital tools and artificial intelligence.

Enjoy!

Major research grant supports new open scholarship initiative

The global upheaval caused by COVID-19 has highlighted a need for academics to find ways to share their research quickly, freely and with large audiences. But open scholarship continues to pose significant hurdles for researchers worldwide.

A new, interdisciplinary seven-year project seeks to overcome those challenges and is being led by Global Innovation Chair in Digital Humanities at the University of Newcastle Professor Ray Siemens, a member of the Centre for 21st Century Humanities.

The Centre for 21st Century Humanities is a partner in the Canadian-Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship (CAPOS), a collaboration which aims to advance the understanding of, and resolve crucial issues in, the production, distribution, and engagement of open, digital scholarship.

The key Canadian cluster in CAPOS—the INKE Partnership has recently been awarded $2.5 million for the project Implementing Open Scholarship: Foundations for Social Engagement at Scale. This is matched by nearly $3,250,000 in cash and in-kind contributions from partner organizations and institutions across Canada and Australia.

Professor Siemens says this new funding will facilitate research to address challenges with scholarly communication by providing broad access to research, community training, public engagement, and policy recommendations.

If you’d like to learn more about this work, please join us for a presentation and discussion about it at 9-10 am on 4 September; registration is via this link.

Research uncovers the historical experiences of the earliest global domestic workers

Professor Victoria Haskins is leading a $195,000 Australian Research Council study which is bringing to life the experiences and histories of the world’s first travelling global domestic workers, the Indian Ayahs and the Chinese Amahs who were employed by colonial families during the period of British colonialism.

Victoria said the Indian nursemaid, or Ayah, occupies a cherished place in the imaginary of imperial and colonial histories.

“Individual recollections of British colonisers in South and South-East Asia have been compiled into the one abiding childhood memory of the devoted native nursemaid.”

The project aims to understand and articulate the historical connections between colonialism, carework, and labour mobility as related to female domestic care workers from India and China.

Podcast: Prof Lyndall Ryan on Frontier War Stories

Professor Lyndall Ryan, leader of the team behind the Colonial Frontier Massacres Map, was interviewed by Boe Spearim for his podcast Frontier War Stories. The podcast focuses on Lyndall's earlier work on Frontier conflict in the 1820s and 1830s between Aboriginal people and British in New South Wales and Tasmania.

Listen now...

Podcast: Dr Justin Ellis on police accountability

Criminologist Dr Justin Ellis features in the Our Human Experience podcast and details his research into social media and police accountabilty, commenting on the tragic death of George Floyd and similar cases of police use of excessive force at the Sydney Mardi Gras.

Listen now...

Comparing the language of disaster from history and the modern day

Early modern literary historian and digital humanities researcher with the Centre for 21st Century Humanities, Dr Erin McCarthy is leading a new project that will compare and contrast the language used to describe early modern disasters and contemporary disasters such as the recent bushfires that ravaged the east coast of Australia.

The project will compare historical and modern day accounts of environmental crisis by applying digital methods, including n-grams, topic modelling and sentiment analysis, to identify broader patterns and trends.

The idea for the project was sparked during the  Knowledge Frontiers Forum which was held in Brisbane during the time of the Queensland bushfires in late 2019.

“Forum participants were literally confronted with smoke from the Queensland bushfires from their tenth-floor urban vista in Brisbane. Discussions repeatedly drifted to the ‘new normal’ and impending disaster that this smoke seemed to signal. This research takes a long view to situate these views in their historical context,” Erin said.

Survey seeks answers to understand our energy future

What does Australia’s energy future look like and what do Australians want it to look like?

These are just some of the questions that Dr Hedda Askland from the Centre for 21st Century Humanities and Dr Alfonso Arranz from the University of Melbourne are seeking to answer in their research project aiming to better understand the debate and community involvement around energy transition.

The researchers have launched a survey and are seeking participants to better understand the attitudes, beliefs and understanding of organisations, key opinion leaders and individuals when it comes to low-emissions technologies.

The survey will form part of a multi-phased research project as the researchers work to map out and forecast what the future of energy in Australia looks like.

Online virtual exchange gives sociology students new perspective on COVID-19

University of Newcastle sociology students are exchanging diverse perspectives on life during COVID-19 and collaborating with their peers at the University of Texas in Austin, USA, in a unique global virtual exchange program.

Deputy Director of the Centre for 21st Century Humanities and Urban Sociologist, Professor Duncan McDuie-Ra teaches the course Landscape and Power, a new undergraduate course which incorporates a virtual exhange component exploring how our surrounding environment shapes social interactions.

Duncan said the online international exchange component of the course proved invaluable to his students’ work, allowing them to compare and contrast two environments in real-time—Austin and Newcastle—that are vastly different in some ways, but whose similarities have become more poignant as a result of the global health crisis.

“There were a lot of similarities: empty landscapes, changing feelings and experiences of space, heightened fear and anxiety when outside, new rules and transgressions of these rules observed in everyday life,” Duncan said. "One of the main differences the students noted were in public reactions. There seemed to be more opposition in the US, more overt challenges to new rules."

History Week events promote the importance of history in navigating todays challenges

The University of Newcastle is celebrating History Week 2020 (5 - 13 September) with a series of events that highlight this year’s theme ‘History: what is it good for?’ which invites participants to share why history is important to them.

The year 2020 has been momentous with bushfires, pandemics and protests. Vice President of the NSW History Council and Newcastle historian Associate Professor Nancy Cushing says "these events have given history a new urgency and History Week events will encourage deeper thinking about how an understanding of history is useful in navigating the challenges of the present and to inform how we move into the future.”

The Library is hosting a Missed in History Wikipedia edit-a-thon on 8 September. Participants will get the opportunity to build new skills and contribute knowledge to their community by enhancing Wikipedia content that connects to the University of Newcastle and its regions, incorporating people, places and events that have been ‘Missed in History’.

Nancy Cushing and colleagues will highlight the career benefits of a history degree in the online seminar 'A History Degree: What is it good for?' via Zoom on 10 September. Register online.

Call for papers - Taking Control: the critical and creative uses of digital tools

Abstract proposals are due by 15 December 2020 for the international edited collection entitled 'Taking Control: the critical and creative uses of digital tools in the now, the foreseeable future, and beyond, in screen, literature, and the visual arts'.

Taking Control seeks to examine the current uses, and the potential for expansion and extension, and possible future uses of AI in relation to screen and literature and visual culture texts and narratives; as well as the little explored angle of cultural criticism and cultural meaning in those human-AI assisted productions.

For full submission details and instructions please contact Dr Jo Parnell.