Audiobook publishing has grown substantially over the past decade, to the point that publishers now consider audiobooks the ‘fourth format’ alongside hardbacks, paperbacks, and ebooks. This growth is evident in regards both to the rapidly increasing volume of audiobooks published, and the sale of audiobooks, although the lack of reliable, industry-wide data confounds some efforts to understand the scope and significance of these shifts. This paper introduces the bibliographic data currently being developed for the Australian Research Council project Audiobooks and Digital Book Culture in partnership with literary database AustLit: an effort to create an index of Australian audiobooks, both retrospectively and contemporary, that showcases the scope and breadth of titles, publishers and individuals operating in this vibrant space.

Popular discourse about audiobooks tends to fixate on questions about the relationship between audiobooks and print: whether or not they ‘count’ as books, and whether reading an audiobook ‘counts’ as reading. We respond to this with the literal ‘counting’ of audiobooks. We argue that bibliography, and the bibliographic data model, offer a precise and concrete language as well as a methodology that enables us to resolve these kinds of questions, and we hope will ultimately provide an evidence base to argue for the cultural significance of audiobooks as an exciting and distinctive cultural form.

Digitised political archives like the Australian Hansard offer researchers unprecedented access to primary sources. Yet their sheer scale and structural complexity challenge traditional search methods. This presentation introduces a critically informed methodology for navigating such collections, grounded in principles from the digital humanities. Demonstrated through a pilot study on ‘educational crisis’ rhetoric in Hansard debates (1958–1972), the approach combines expansive and critical search strategies, qualitative filtering, generative AI tools (e.g., argument analysis using the Toulmin model), and visualisation. This method aims to address the contingent nature of digitised and curated historical collections while preserving the serendipity valued in archival research. By integrating close and distant reading, this method enables researchers and students to analyse themes, arguments, and policy shifts across time. It exemplifies how advanced digital techniques can support richer, context-sensitive engagement with large-scale primary source collections.