Comics, cartoons and drawings can engage people with history and help to understand political issues that shape the present. Digital archives of these kinds of images can be useful resources but must be built carefully. This talk will discuss two pilot studies, one which tracks historical images over time, and another that tracks them over distance:

The first case study uses database of cartoons published between 1883 and 1911 in Australia’s The Bulletin, to interrogate the history “The Little Boy from Manly”, a now-forgotten cartoon character who was once was widely understood as the visual personification of Australia’s national spirit, much like Uncle Sam in the U.S.A. or John Bull in the U.K. Tracking the character’s development across time helps illuminate the development of Australia’s national mythology, and shows that the established history of The Little Boy from Manly is in major need of correction.

The second project, by contrast, examines images drawn by prisoners in the archipelago of internment camps within Australia during World War II. This carceral archipelago included camps for prisoners from Germany, England, Japan, Italy and other nations, and within each group distinct cultures of drawing and caricature developed. Creating a database of images drawn within this system of internment helps to map the artistic and political sentiments within this overlooked epoch of Australian history.

Together, both case studies raise questions about what kinds of images get preserved, archived and digitised, and how digital humanities can best honour the legacy of these historical drawings.

The Singing the News project, housed at ANU, aims to reveal how songs in premodern Europe, and later in Australia, were used for disseminating news to the public. Researchers are collecting news ballads describing military, disaster, wonder, political, and crime and punishment events in nine languages to investigate how news media operated before the rise of literacy and mass media. This paper will describe development of a custom ‘ballad’ ontology and linked data schema used to structure, analyse and present this vast corpus of research data.

The Omeka S web publishing platform was chosen to curate and exhibit the Singing the News project. Data includes images of the ballad song sheets, associated metadata, transcripts and translations, audio recordings, and geospatial and custom metadata fields.

A combination of Dublin Core metadata vocabulary with the addition of custom fields was used to develop the ‘Ballad’ ontology, co-designed with historian Dr Una McIlvenna. This approach provided flexibility to document the nuances of this variable form of cultural heritage, while also providing a robust structure allowing for statistical, geographic and theme analysis. Custom fields were required to document the content and context of the ballads, for example, the name and type of ship involved in a shipwreck, or the crime(s) and method of punishment of an accused. Challenges such as how to standardise fields and values across languages, themes, time and space will be discussed.

The linked data structure allows connections in the data, such as between themes, tunes, actors, locations and events to be revealed and highlighted, rather than each record presented as a silo. This approach not only allows increased efficiency and robustness of the data, but also enhances exploration and accessibility of this valuable collection of digital cultural heritage.

SF author Bruce Stirling’s 1988 Islands in the Net foresaw a world in 2025 where public discourse is neutralised by a global information network that appears to offer freedom but is used to supress it. The protagonists undertake an odyssey through communities marginally connected to this network and struggling to maintain their cultural and political independence.

This idea was one inspiration for research I have been embarked in since 2011, conceptualising experimental artist and arts organisations in Australia from the 1980s as elements of significant creative ecosystems. Artists were addressing the challenges of changing the society in which they lived at the same time as remaining free of its constraints, known in anarchist literature as Temporary Autonomous Zones (Bey, 1985) that has its roots in Situationist philosophy (Debord, 1991, 1967; Vaneigem, 1967).

These artist endeavours and their successors were and continue to be marginalised by institutional collections. The outcome of my PhD research is a online digital archive using linked open data devoted to a significant experimental theatre company, Canberra Splinters Theatre of Spectacle (1985-98). The next step is to expand this to a service for other artists using the free, open-source platform Omeka S and linking it to the national collections ecosystem in Trove through its Content Contributor program.