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Public
Seminars December 2004
The ARC Linkage Research project delivered
two public seminars early in December.
Seminar 1. Making Collective Memory
With Computers:
Research Feedback Seminar
Wed 8th December 2004
The ARC Research Project has been
running for over a year now and we took this opportunity
to provide feedback to the public and the university
community on where we have come from, and what we are
looking to achieve in the rest of the project. At the
seminar we officially launched this research website.
We gave a review of what we have achieved so far, in
terms of project development and research findings and
demonstrated some of the technical work which has been
done. Speakers included Michael Christie, Waymamba Gaykamangu,
Bryce King, Trevor van Weeren and Helen Verran.
Seminar 2. Nineteenth Century British
Explorers And
Twenty-First Century Australian Databasers
Friday, 10th December 2004
Dr Helen Verran, Reader,
Dept of History and Philosophy of Science, University
of Melbourne.
In the nineteenth century scores of
British scientific expeditions of discovery contributed
to the assemblage of a vast imperial archive. They collected
specimens of plants, animals, soils, 'other' humans,
languages and number systems, among other things. In
the twenty first century it is usual to think of databases
held by various contemporary institutions by analogy
to that vast imperial archive. This metaphor regards
the data items that populate those databases as virtual
specimens. I suggest that this set of ordinary understandings
hides some significant characteristics of twenty first
century databasing. It has us misunderstanding knowledge
economies in general. Some inadequacies of these conventional
understandings of twenty first century databasing are
usefully revealed by taking seriously the challenges
and possibilities offered when investigating how digitising
technologies might facilitate Aboriginal natural resource
management and intergenerational transmission of knowledge
in doing collective memory. Working with Aboriginal
knowledge traditions helps us to develop a deeper understanding
of general relations between digitising technologies
and knowledge.
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East Indies Map by Johannes
Van Keulen, c 1680
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