Cultural Data in Australian History: An Intimate Analytics Methodology

Cognisant of Australia’s settler-colonial history, the conceptual framing of the research infrastructure project, the Australian Cultural Data Engine (ACD-E, 2021-2023), interrogated five Australian cultural collections with large curated databases for the performing arts, architecture and visual arts history. The poster highlights how the research team developed a cross-walk architecture, by retaining unique entitites while facilitating comparative analysis, in ways that disrupt the logics of the originating research communities.[1]

Following, for instance, the question of careers in the arts, we examined event datapoints that accumulate over time, as well as considering the extent to which key markers of success impact on the trajectory of a career. In the analysis of the exhibition, Know My Name (2021) at the National Gallery of Australia, we argue that such born-digital cultural collections must grapple not only with their distinctive content but also the historical contexts embedded in the cultural data itself. Moreover, being able to aggregate diverse datapoints via mapping technologies, we could identify how artistic networks and scenes were indicative of other longer-term social formations. 

When pursued with vigour, this methodology, that we term intimate analytics, can enhance, trouble, and unsettle conventional approaches to cultural data research, and put it into dialogue with the existing structures, biases and conventions of knowing the past. This is particularly so, when indigenous knowledge traditions relating to place or naming conventions are articulated alongside western European conceptions of cartography or identity in Australia.