Centre projects focus on creating new knowledge in the 21st Century

Thursday, 28 March 2019

The Centre for 21st Century Humanities is hosting eleven new projects this year that connect with the theme ‘Knowledge Creation in the 21st Century’.

Centre projects focus on creating new knowledge in the 21st Century

Researchers are delving into projects that align with the Centre’s ongoing commitment to e-research, industry engagement and crossing disciplines.

Centre for 21st Century Humanities Director, Professor Victoria Haskins said the projects bring to life the Centre’s aim to foster innovation in the digital humanities.

“What we strive for in the Centre for 21stCentury Humanities is to create new knowledge that deeply impacts and improves our understanding of humanity, culture and history.  These projects will all produce tangible outcomes that benefit the local and national population by bringing to light previously invisible information and making it accessible via online formats,” Professor Haskins said.

The projects include:

  • Dr Julie McIntyre’s development of a digital Dictionary of Newcastlewhich will bring online the city’s historical archives. The Dictionary of Newcastle will provide a reliable online, searchable source of historical knowledge on Newcastle past as it relates to coal and other forms of employment and culture.
  • Dr Gillian Arrighi’s plan to create a digital map that will allow the visualisation of international touring undertaken by Australian child actors during the period 1981 to 1914. Derived from new research insights into the competencies of child performers and child actors’ contribution to the transmission of theatrical trends and culture across wide areas, the map will enable viewers to see time- and geo-coded representations of the children’s travels laid over historic geo-political maps from the era.
  • Associate Professor Jesper Gulddal’s initiative that will generate new knowledge of the factors that respectively impede and facilitate the sale of Australian crime fiction licensing and translation rights, thereby enabling authors, literary agencies, publishers and governmental agencies to approach the international market in a more informed and strategic way. The project will offer significant national benefits for Australia in relation to economics, commerce, and culture.
  • Professor Ros Smith’s plan to reinvent the once groundbreaking but now outdated database in early modern studies, the frames-based Perdita site at Warwick University. The project will reinvent an important early modern resource, explore shared research questions in digital design and humanities, and address larger issues surrounding the longevity, maintenance and continuity of digital resources in humanities research.
  • Professor Bill Palmer’s project that will create digital humanities tools that will facilitate knowledge creation in the areas of spatial cognition, Indigenous Australian languages, and the role of landscape in Indigenous grammar. The tools will be available to the wider research community to support knowledge creation by other scholars into the future.

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