Cultural data collections in Australia are at a critical juncture. While exciting new methods and approaches in cultural analytics have revealed the multifaceted uses and cross-disciplinary value of data about arts and cultural production, many of the collections from which the data are sourced face unprecedented institutional and infrastructural pressures to assert value, sustainability and users. At the same time, industry, government, and the GLAM sector are increasingly reliant on cultural data to tell better stories about how dynamics such as gender, ethnicity, education and investment shape the arts in Australia.
With these pressing challenges on our doorstep, this one-day symposium showcases the highlights and key outputs of the Australian Cultural Data Engine (ACD-Engine), a the 2-year ARC project, while also asking urgent questions about the future of cultural data in Australia.
Across a keynote, themed panels, roundtables and networking with colleagues and researchers from across the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, Library and Computer Sciences, and GLAM sectors, we invite you to join us as we examine the trends, new perspectives, and potential futures of Australian cultural data.
When: Thursday, 24 August 2023
Where: The Digital Studio, Arts West Level 2, The University of Melbourne Parkville Campus
This is a free in-person event, but bookings are essential. Please click here to register your spot. Catering will be provided. Please let us know when booking if you have a specific dietary or access requirements.
Program
9.00
Welcome
9.15
KEYNOTE
'Where are the humans?: Labour, expertise and interpretation in cultural analytics' (Associate Professor Miguel Escobar Varela, Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore)
10.15
'Cog, Tool, Machine: Building the Australian Cultural Data Engine' (Professor Rachel Fensham and Dr Tyne Daile Sumner, University of Melbourne)
10.30
Morning tea
11.00
PEOPLE: Identity, Careers, Ontologies
'AusStage by the Numbers: Or, Who the Hell is Robert?' (Professor Chris Hay, Liz Larkin & Caitlin West, Flinders University)
'People, Places and Radical Exchanges: Visualizing Circus Oz Data’' (Dr Kirsten Stevens, University of Melbourne)
'A Person-Oriented Ontologies Analysis of ACD-Engine Datasets' (Rui Liu and Associate Professor George Buchanan, University of Melbourne)
12.00
ORGANISATIONS: Histories, Influence, Power Dynamics
'Institutional Landscapes of Culture: An Analysis of Trends in the Design and Art Australia Online (DAAO) Event Data' (Dr Scott East, UNSW, and Joanna Mendelssohn, University of Melbourne)
'Potholes and Promises: Architectural History as Data, the Case of the Digital Archive of Queensland Architecture (DAQA)' (Professor John McArthur and Dr Deborah van der Plaat, University of Queensland)
'Action, Prop, Equipment, Gear?: Circus Data and Challenges for Coding and Description' (Professor Lisa M. Given, Professor David Carlin, Dr Sarah Polkinghorne, and Joann Cattlin)
1.00: Lunch
2.00
RELATIONSHIPS: Code, Infrastructures, Aggregation
'3D Digital Heritage as a Scholarly Ecosystem' (Dr David McMeekin and Professor Erik Champion, Curtin University)
'Multi-Layered Analysis in the Time-Layered Cultural Map of Australia ' (Professor Hugh Craig, University of Newcastle)
'Structural Elements and Spheres of Expertise: Creating a Healthy Cultural Data Ecosystem' (Professor Lisa M. Given, Dr Sarah Polkinghorne, and Joann Cattlin, RMIT University)
3.00
Coffee
3.30
CULTURAL DATA IMPACT: Gaps, Needs, Resources (Roundtable)
Professor James Smithies (King's College London), Professor Rachel Fensham (University of Melbourne), Associate Professor Tully Barnett (Flinders University), Josh Nicholas (the Guardian) and Professor Rosalind Smith (Australian National University).
4.30
Closing remarks & wrap up
Abstracts
KEYNOTE
'Where are the humans?: Labour, expertise and interpretation in cultural analytics' (Associate Professor Miguel Escobar Varela, Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore)
There are many ways to think about the roles that humans play in cultural analytics. Some projects aim to offer reproducible results that are somewhat observer-independent, while others focus on adding new perspectives to previous interpretations. Another way to think about human actions is to ask ourselves: to what extent is automation one of the goals of our projects? Are we designing pipelines that can be fully automated, or are we trying to develop human-in-the-loop systems? Lastly, we can consider the many types of expertise involved in the different stages of a project, from data curation to the communication of the results. The objective of this talk is to offer a conceptual map of human actions that will help us assess existing projects and chart future journeys. I will conclude by looking at the challenges and opportunities brought forth by large language models (LLMs). These technologies offer the possibility of automating many analytical tasks and could be a boon for cultural analytics projects. However, they are notoriously hard to debug. This means we will need new ways to identify and conceptualize human labour, interpretation and expertise. Asking “where are the humans?” is a crucial ethnographic and computational exercise that will only become more important going forward.
PEOPLE: IDENTITY, CAREERS, ONTOLOGIES
'AusStage by the Numbers: Or, Who the Hell is Robert?' (Professor Chris Hay, Liz Larkin & Caitlin West, Flinders University)
As part of the Australian Cultural Data Engine (ACD-E) project, we have been working with a list of ‘top contributors’ to AusStage; that is, those who are attached to the most individual production records in the Australian database of live performance. Atop this list, with more than 100 more production records than the second entry, is one Robert Taylor. Working solely with this dataset, then, we might assume Taylor is among the nation’s most significant artists — or at least that he is a key node in multiple theatrical networks. But who is he? In this presentation, we will use the case of Robert Taylor to reflect on the intersection of disciplinary expertise and data literacy that is required to work effectively with cultural data. This allows us to think through how the collaboration with the ACD-E has prompted us to reconsider elements of AusStage’s data ontology and curatorial practices. This enquiry also reveals the role of data entry and the influence of individual research projects on the construction of databases, and we will offer some further reflections on how this inflects the types of research that can be powered by cultural data in Australia.
'People, Places and Radical Exchanges: Visualizing Circus Oz Data’' (Dr Kirsten Stevens, University of Melbourne)
How do you imagine a circus? A series of acts, a collection of tours, a variety of shows staged in multiple locations, an assortment of individuals drawn together who make it all possible? As these elements merge, they produce on the one hand the magic of the circus as performance – a spectacle that is a source of memories and wonderment for audiences. But they also produce data. Records of show dates, cast-lists, locations, tour schedules, and more. These data perform the circus in their own way, offering insight into the collaborations, activity, and organisational trends that shape the circus company over time. Presenting findings from the project “Circus Oz: People, Places, Radical Exchanges” (PPRE), part of the ARC-funded AusStage LIEF 7, this paper explores the cultural data produced by Circus Oz over its more than forty-year history. Combining existing Circus Oz datasets with significant new data spanning the company’s history and archives, the PPRE project produced a near-comprehensive dataset of Australia’s oldest contemporary circus company. Focusing on the people and performances that have shaped Circus Oz, this paper interrogates the power of data visualizations to offer meaningful insight into the story of circus in Australia.
'A Person-Oriented Ontologies Analysis of ACD-Engine Datasets' (Rui Liu and Associate Professor George Buchanan, University of Melbourne)
Mapping between different representations of similar data is a common challenge in digital humanities (DH). In practical cultural collections, the ‘person’ is an essential and centric unit, and other parts could link to the ‘person’ to form the knowledge base. The same person could have different names for marriage reasons or language changes, and different persons could have the same name, creating ambiguity or errors for database users. However, there is still no general and useful person-oriented ontology in DH community. Many practical DH projects have developed their own ontologies by DH experts, but these ontologies are not interoperable. Therefore, it is important to explore existing biographical ontologies and develop a comprehensive person-oriented ontology for cultural knowledge graphs. Using ontology mapping methodology, such as metadata crosswalk, could provide a foundation for future person-oriented ontology construction to accomplish semantic interoperability between DH collections.
ORGANISATIONS: HISTORIES, INFLUENCE, POWER DYNAMICS
'Institutional Landscapes of Culture: An Analysis of Trends in the Design and Art Australia Online (DAAO) Event Data' (Dr Scott East, UNSW, and Joanna Mendelssohn, University of Melbourne)
The DAAO is the largest authoritative open data source on Australia’s artists and designers – containing approximately 17000 biographies and data on 22524 events. Analysing event data, key trends in Australia’s cultural landscape can be tracked, including the Museum boom across the 1970s and 80s, trends in language use and key networks of institutions which regularly share exhibitions. Using novel language processing on event data enabled us to cluster institutions in surprising ways, revealing new linkages between institutions by considering their offerings. Working with this data also provided an opportunity to reflect on the DAAO data as a whole, considering its limitation and the challenges of working with cultural data. Finally, we reflect on the importance of cultural data to recording national cultural heritage.
Potholes and Promises: Architectural History as Data, the Case of the Digital Archive of Queensland Architecture (DAQA)' (Professor John McArthur and Dr Deborah van der Plaat, University of Queensland)
The Digital Archive of Queensland Architecture (DAQA) is the record of a well-regarded oral history project. As the database developed and has continued to be used the researchers partnered with the Australian Cultural Data Engine, (ACD-E) to understand how the data in the archive could be interpretated as a whole. While DAQA began as a heuristic process of inquiry into particular architects and projects, essentially an index of facts for the use of historians, the scale of the data collected now enables a level of analysis which promises to produce new findings about the breadth and character of activity in a period, such as education levels, women’s participation, and the life of professional firms. It also opens architectural historical data into a common ontology that promises links to cultural datasets beyond architecture. This paper reflects on the promises of opening architectural history into the wider stream of digital humanities and data science, but also the potholes and lumps found in massaging historical findings into a clean data.
‘Action, Prop, Equipment, Gear?: Circus Data and Challenges for Coding and Description' (Professor Lisa M. Given, Professor David Carlin, Dr Sarah Polkinghorne, and Joann Cattlin)
Cultural datasets must be searchable if they are to fulfil their potential for research and everyday exploration. In this regard, the importance of high-quality metadata is widely recognised, but cultural data teams often do not have the resources, expertise, and time to focus extensively on this process. Additionally, most approaches to metadata development and schema standardisation do not account for the distinctive qualities of many cultural datasets, and certainly those containing recordings of live performances outside the context of music concerts. Working through multiple levels of coding on Circus Oz Memory Booth data has led to insights into the specific challenges of describing circus performances. Circus, perhaps more than any other art form, challenges categorical separations between performers’ bodies and actions, the “gear” they use, the skills they embody, and the influences they reflect. This makes circus a context with unique potential to inform the creation of more sophisticated approaches to metadata creation for performing arts datasets.
RELATIONSHIPS: CODE, INFRASTRUCTURES, AGGREGATION
'3D Digital Heritage as a Scholarly Ecosystem' (Dr David McMeekin and Professor Erik Champion, Curtin University)
This short presentation will argue Digital Humanities has not focused on 3D data projects, but that this is changing. I will describe some important but difficult components required for cultural heritage data of the 3D persuasion and the potential interfaces and solutions that could be of use to architects, art historians and archaeologists.
'Multi-Layered Analysis in the Time-Layered Cultural Map of Australia ' (Professor Hugh Craig, University of Newcastle)
The TLCMap platform (the Time Layered Cultural Map of Australia at tlcmap.org) is a partner in the ACD-Engine project. In early days of ACDE, in the course of discussions within the ACDE group, colleagues suggested a new function in TLCMap to combine map layers in a single map while preserving the structure of the components. The funding allowed us to build that capability. Now TLCMap users can create a ‘Multilayer’ and see how patterns in a new layer fit with patterns in existing layers, or can divide a new layer into multiple components to see how categories interact.
Structural Elements and Spheres of Expertise: Creating a Healthy Cultural Data Ecosystem' (Professor Lisa M. Given, Dr Sarah Polkinghorne, and Joann Cattlin, RMIT University)
Many cultural datasets exist in a precarious ecosystem, where erratic funding, fragmented support, and disconnected expertise threatens their continued existence. This exploratory study interviewed cultural data experts in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom in order to map the broad cultural data ecosystem and identify opportunities for it to grow healthier. We find that the development and maintenance of cultural data collections requires integration across spheres of expertise, foundational structural components, and key elements including clarity of purpose, user-focused design, sustainability, allied coproduction, and reciprocal interconnection. As the cultural data ecosystem grows healthier, more collections and initiatives will have positive impacts for research, knowledge, and diverse communities.