{"id":5527,"date":"2015-07-23T10:13:27","date_gmt":"2015-07-23T00:13:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.wordpress.com\/?p=5527"},"modified":"2022-08-04T00:24:18","modified_gmt":"2022-08-04T00:24:18","slug":"digital-history-at-ozha2015-there-was-some","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/2015\/07\/23\/digital-history-at-ozha2015-there-was-some\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital History at #OzHA2015? There was some"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Screenshot<\/a>
The Prosecution Project from Griffith University is examining the history of criminal trials in Australia between 1850 and 1960.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There are good reasons to attend conferences. I treat them as my CPD (professional parlance for Continuing Professional Development). At a productive conference I learn a great deal from being immersed in a learning environment for several days. The breaks are as productive as a session because they are good opportunities to chat with others in the field about their work and further discuss what we have learned. These blog posts I am writing are a further opportunity for me to think through new ideas and approaches as well as to pass the learning on.<\/p>\n

The Global Digital Humanities Conference was a week before the Australian Historical Association Conference. As I said in previous posts, Australian historians Peter Read, Julia Torpey<\/a> and Tim Sherratt<\/a> featured at those conferences. It was a rare\u00a0opportunity for Australian historians interested in Digital History to learn from leading digital humanities practitioners.<\/p>\n

It is very difficult for one person to attend two conferences in one fortnight, so it was understandable that digital history was not a big focus at the Australian Historical Association Conference. There were no sessions titled ‘digital history’ or something similar that would convey that the papers were about the use of technology in history.<\/p>\n

Yet digital history was there.\u00a0My paper was about digital history<\/a> as was Janette Pelosi\u2019s paper about the State Records NSW digitisation project, ‘Sentenced Beyond the Seas<\/a>‘ which she presented in the same session.<\/p>\n

With low expectations I have searched through the 2015 conference abstracts for papers featuring the words, digital, data, website, internet, social media, Facebook, Twitter. To my surprise I found thirteen papers which could be regarded as digital history. This was more than I expected.<\/p>\n

It\u00a0is a superficial analysis. Can I really conclude that every paper that uses the word \u2018data\u2019 is about digital history? But when you look at the papers in my list below I think you will find that the majority appear to touch on some aspect of digital history.<\/p>\n

I also came across a couple of digital history projects during the conference which I don\u2019t believe were the subject of conference papers:<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Suffrage Postcard Project<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n