{"id":6564,"date":"2017-07-16T17:51:45","date_gmt":"2017-07-16T07:51:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/?p=6564"},"modified":"2022-08-04T00:26:01","modified_gmt":"2022-08-04T00:26:01","slug":"topics-ozha2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stumblingpast.com\/2017\/07\/16\/topics-ozha2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Topics that Interest Historians in Australia"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This word cloud shows frequency of words used in the abstracts of papers delivered at concurrent sessions at the 2017 Australian Historical Association conference. Generated using Voyant.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The annual gathering of historians in Australia is big. This year there were nearly 300 papers delivered in concurrent sessions. Yesterday I blogged about the keynotes and plenary panels<\/a>. Today I will have a look at the masses of papers delivered by over three hundred historians. Before you recoil in horror at the prospect of a very lengthy post, I assure you that I will be giving a very broad overview with a closer look at a few topics.<\/p>\n

To get an idea of the topics and issues that were of particular interest to historians at the conference, I uploaded the abstracts from the concurrent sessions in Voyant<\/a> and looked at the frequency of words used. Voyant excludes ‘stop words’ from analysis such as ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘an.<\/p>\n

One of the most frequently used in the abstracts for the concurrent sessions was ‘war’. But I am cautious about the method I used. One abstract may use a keyword many times. So I inserted all the abstracts into a spreadsheet and then counted how many abstracts had at least one mention of the word ‘war’. This method showed that 63 of the 299 abstracts for the concurrent sessions, or 21%, used the word ‘war’.<\/p>\n

That sounds like a lot of papers. But this is a modern history conference and the twentieth century had a lot of horrific wars. These figures might give the impression that there was a lot of war history in the conference but this is not necessarily the case. It includes papers such as Cheryl Glowrey’s environmental history paper on fishing in the Bass Strait which notes that the World Wars had an impact on the technology and environmental issues in fishing. It also includes Laura Ticehurst’s paper on dating in the post-war 1950s. In these cases the historical discussion in the abstract, recognises war as a disruptive force in society but the focus of the analysis is not on the war itself but the period after the war.\u00a0However, the statistics also include the papers of the War Crimes Panel and the PNG War Panel.<\/p>\n

This is a demonstration of the need for caution in interpreting statistics and not being seduced by the results of easy-to-use tools that are widely available to interpret data.<\/p>\n

Aboriginal History<\/h1>\n

https:\/\/twitter.com\/nthistorian\/status\/882472563078610944\/photo\/1<\/p>\n

Of greater interest is the focus on indigenous peoples. The words ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘indigenous’ were used often in the abstracts. Again I checked the number of papers that used these words together with ‘Aborigine’.<\/p>\n

Thirteen percent of abstracts mentioned ‘indigenous’ words. It is not surprising that many historians recognise the indigenous history of a colonial settler nation like Australia. You would hope that every historian at a national conference would hear about indigenous history in at least one paper and that was the case at this conference. Professor Grace Karskens’ keynote presentation was on ‘Re-entangling settler colonial, Aboriginal and environmental history<\/a>‘.<\/p>\n

When I saw how often the words ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Indigenous’ were mentioned in the abstracts it reminded me that Aboriginal people are one of the most studied peoples, and it is generally European-Australians who are the ones studying Aboriginal peoples. It is important that European Australians always remember to include our significant indigenous history, but it is also important we listen to Aboriginal people research and tell their own history.<\/p>\n

And so it was good that this conference included a number of Aboriginal historians. The conference biographies<\/a> indicate that the following Aboriginal historians presented:<\/p>\n