Defining and Exploring Networks and Circles with LORE

The amount of literature on the study of social networks is massive, having a long history that predates the analyses that are being pursued in this age of Facebook and Twitter. See the Wikipedia entry on Social Network. Students of book history and print culture might have come across studies by Charles Kadushin and others that have explored the social networks and circles of publishing in the United States of America. Books: the Culture and Commerce of Publishing (1981) draws deeply on work done in the 1960s and 1970s to identify and define the American intellectual elite. The 1974 book The American Intellectual Elite was reprinted in 2005 with a new introduction by Kadushin, demonstrating the continued relevance of his studies to an understanding of the ways in which books are written, published, sold and read. To see how widely Kadushin's research extends, see his bibliography.

The primary social networks of Australian literature have been well defined in research conducted during the last fifty years, but the validity of these networks and their hidden complexity have not been explored. AustLit data can be used to visualise relationships between people and organisations, but the data model does not extend beyond fundamental bibliographical descriptions such as "also writes as", "influenced by", "co-author with".

Visualisation of these relationships has been achieved by drawing on such connections within AustLit, but LORE promises to extend this by enabling researchers to enhance and add relationships with additional descriptions that can better define the social structure of publishing. For instance, the structure of a publisher or periodical can be enhanced by using terms such as "employed by", "literary editor of", "acquaintance of", "father of", "mother of" "literary agent of", "mentor of" etc. Settling on the appropriate terms for the study of publishing is not easy and probably would never stop as unique circumstances arise that better describe certain relationships. Nevertheless, creating an "ontology" that lists all possible relationships within a certain social structure is important. The gradual accumulation of such information will ulimately produce a rich relational database that can be searched and analysed in order to better understand the social networks involved in the production and consumption of Australian literature.

As LORE is refined over the next six months, the possibilities of creating and exploring social networks will be more closely considered. Automatic mining of links between people and organisations has created thousands of compound objects that show undefined relationships between two or more people and organisations. For instance, the diagram at left visualises the many relationships that radiate from the performer, writer and producer, Nat Phillips. Such visualisations suggest the potential for collaborative refinement of these inferred relationships if individual researchers and groups can add or correct any link in this complex network.


The visualisation need not be as complex as the Nat Phillips example. Simply defining the relationship between an author and their literary editor adds a link to the network of Australian print culture, such as this relationship between Thea Astley and Beatrice Davis. Automatically inferring relationships from AustLit data and manually creating relationships using LORE will provide a foundation for future research into the social networks of Australian literature.

To see how relationships can be created using LORE, please visit the Aus-e-Lit Project Site or AustLit. Links to updated video demonstrations will soon be added, providing more detailed information about all Aus-e-Lit tools. Until then, please visit the current demo page.

And anyone interested in helping to better define the definitions of relationships between people and organisations in literary or print culture studies .... We'd love to hear from you.

Australian Newspapers Beta

The National Libraries of Australia recently launched Australian Newspapers in a beta version. The project aims to digitise more than a dozen major newspapers from Australian capital cities, ranging in date from 1803 to 1954. Although the project is in a very early stage with limited coverage so far it will prove a significant resource for the study of Australian literature.

I conducted several searches on authors I am familiar with from my own research to see what sort of new information emerged. I'm particularly interested in Vance Palmer because of his dual role as a 'man of letters' and as a writer of popular fiction. Not only do you find reports of his radio addresses from the 1940s in the Canberra Times, but a number of serial versions of his early novels are also found in the Argus. The latter is particularly important because until now they had escaped the notice of AustLit indexers. For research on working writers, literary criticism, book news, readers and reading, Australian Newspapers is and will be an important resource.

The digitised images are quite clear and searches take you directly to the article in which key words appear. The text has been passed through an OCR process, but the results are generally quite poor. To address this shortcoming Australian Newspapers invites (and enables) users to make corrections to the full text. While this will never bring the full text to perfection, I imagine that well researched authors and topics will result in cleaner texts.

The coverage of Australian Newspapers is very patchy at the moment, but as more and more newspaper issues are added to the database, search results will become richer and researchers will get a better idea of the complex networks of Australia's literary culture and the extent to which working authors spread their work across the nation.

Digital Humanities: Past present and Future

On 2 September the Digital Humanities Symposium was hosted by the University of Western Sydney. A relatively small number attended the event, but the presentations and discussion were interesting and relevant to Aus-e-Lit

Willard McCarty talked about the Dictionary of Words in the Wild http://dictionary.mcmaster.ca/ and Paul Arthur talked about spatial history with particular reference to the Northbridge History Project http://www.northbridgehistory.wa.gov.au/ . Ien Ang talked about using the web-site DiverCities http://acl.arts.usyd.edu.au/threecities/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=25&Itemid=37 to facilitate intercultural dialogue. Andrew Murphie talked about open access and the rise of alternative forms of publication, noting the division between tradition and ‘non-hierarchical forms of authority’ See http://www.andrewmurphie.org/ for more. And Leonie Hellmers talked about her new role at http://www.intersect.org.au/ .

In the spirit of these projects, the Aus-e-Lit project aims to contribute to the development of digital humanities in Australia with its collaborative integration and annotation services. AustLit has already built a strong foundation of collaborative research by supporting more than a dozen Research Communities. The expansion of digital services provided through the Austlit interface will further support collaborative research in these projects and, hopefully, lead to the organisation of new research communities that will benefit from the Aus-e-Lit initiatives. In turn, new collaborations will contribute new ideas, assisting the Aus-e-Lit team to develop a service that will assist researchers in the fields of Australian literature and print culture for many years to come.

In the coming weeks and months, this blog will review many old and new digital projects to discover the depth and quality of digital humanities in Australia and to compile a list of web-sites that might inspire other researchers to embark on their own digital projects. Some of these will focus on literature, but many will cross disciplines, providing a view of the past and present that is relevant to all.