Team

University of Melbourne Research Team

  • Rachel Fensham

    LEAD CHIEF INVESTIGATOR

    Rachel Fensham is a Professor of Dance and Theatre Studies. She was Inaugural Director of the Digital Studio, chair of the Sociocultural Informatics Platform, and co-lead CI for the HASS-DEVL national infrastructure research project (2018-19). With international research on digital archives and experience in the design and construction of interactive user tools, she has led multiple cross-institutional and interdisciplinary research projects, most recently developing CIRCUIT, a mapping interface for Theatre Network Australia, Regional Arts Victoria and Creative Victoria, and the award-winning digital heritage project, The Biggest Little Theatre in Australia. In addition to her interdisciplinary research, she is series editor for Palgrave’s New World Choreographies, and is finalising her own book on the material history of archival dance costumes.

  • George Buchanan

    CHIEF INVESTIGATOR

    George Buchanan is an Associate Professor and Director of the University of Melbourne iSchool. He has been researching how to make information more accessible and findable for over twenty years. A multi-award winning author of over two hundred conference and journal publications, he is one of the world’s leading investigators on digital libraries. The use of information in the digital arts and humanities has been a particular focus of Dr. Buchanan’s work, and his work on developing technical methods to combine large-scale collections was supported by the Library of Congress and the British Library. George’s pioneering work on mobile web browsing led to innovations now used on every contemporary mobile phone. His work on the ACD-Engine focuses on the development of information ontologies and cross-database browsing.

  • Tyne Daile Sumner

    CULTURAL DATA RESEARCH FELLOW

    Tyne Sumner is an early career researcher with expertise in literary studies, surveillance studies, and digital humanities. She is the Cultural Data Research Fellow for the ACD-Engine as well as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English and Theatre Studies. She has published on topics ranging from data ethics to contemporary poetry and her monograph, Lyric Eye: The Poetics of Twentieth-Century Surveillance, was published with Routledge in 2021. In 2024, Tyne will take up a DECRA Fellowship at the University of Melbourne. Tyne also has over ten years’ experience in digital research capability building and digital skills training, having worked on national HASS infrastructure projects, in digital strategy roles, and on collaborative skills training initiatives. Tyne is responsible for cultural research and public engagement in the ACD-Engine team.

  • Nat Cutter

    RESEARCH COORDINATOR

    Nat Cutter is an early career historian, with expertise in early modern British-Islamic relations, media history, and digital humanities. His work on early modern English periodical news and the Ottoman Maghreb, based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of digital and manuscript archives (see here, here, and here), won him the 2018 Greg Dening Memorial Prize, the 2019 SHAPS Fellows’ Group Annual History Essay Prize, and the 2021 Hakluyt Society Essay Prize. Nat has been the recipient of research grants and fellowships from the Huntington Library, Folger Shakespeare Library, ANZAMEMS and University of Melbourne. In 2024, he will take up the Mary Lugton Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Melbourne. Nat is also an experienced research coordinator, having worked on ARC Linkage, ARC DECRA, and ARC Discovery projects and as Project Officer at the University of Melbourne’s Digital Studio. Nat’s role in the ACD-Engine includes project management and historical research.

  • Rui Liu

    DOCTORAL CANDIDATE

    Rui Liu is a PhD candidate in the School of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne, and an affiliate researcher on the Australian Cultural Data Engine. She has been devoting to using the ontology construction method and linked open data technology to promote digital humanities development. Rui’s PhD research is primarily about exploring the difficulties of aggregating different digital humanities collections, and developing an aggregation framework to guide future digital humanities practitioners and collection developers to enable easier integration. She is responsible for constructing an interoperable ontology applying to different cultural datasets for the ACD-Engine.

Chief Investigators

Associate Professor Amir Aryani, Head of Social Data Analytics (SoDA) Lab, Swinburne University of Technology. University Profile.

Professor David Carlin, Professor of Creative Writing, RMIT University. University Profile.

Emeritus Professor Hugh Craig, Director of the Centre for Linguistic and Literary Computing, University of Newcastle. University Profile.

Dr Scott East, Lecturer in Art & Design, University of New South Wales. University Profile.

Professor Lisa Given, Professor of Information Science, RMIT University. University Profile.

Professor Chris Hay, Flinders University. Website.

Professor John Macarthur, Professor of Architecture, University of Queensland. University Profile.

Dr David McMeekin, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, Curtin University. University Profile.

Associate Professor Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Fellow, University of Melbourne. University Profile.

Professor James Smithies, Professor of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. University Profile.

Dr Deborah van der Plaat, Senior Research Fellow, University of Queensland. University Profile.

Previous Team Members

Dr Justin Munoz, Data Scientist (2022-23).

Ivy Zheng, Cultural Data Programmer (2021-23).

Dr Trent Ryan, Cultural Data Research Fellow (2021-22).

Gillian Butcher, Events Manager (2023).

Mr Pablo Neyra, Data Visualisation Specialist and Digital Storyteller (2022).