Australian Creative Histories and Futures

Australia’s culture is extensive, dynamic and ever-evolving, and so too is its cultural data. Significant collections of our cultural data have now been amassed, including in literature (via AustLit), the performing arts (AusStage, Circus Oz Living Archive), the visual arts (Design and Art Australia Online), film (AFI Research Collection), and other fields (Australian Dictionary of Biography) as well as via projects that combined some of these and other datasets (HuNI and Australian Cultural Data Engine). And then there are the datasets held by government departments and funding agencies, such as Creative Australia.

Three of the country’s major cultural datasets—AustLit, AusStage, and Creative Australia—lack substantive interoperability. AusStage, which was recently included in UNESCO’s Australian Memory of the World register, has approximately half a million records about the performing arts in Australia. AustLit, a bio-bibliographical database, covers Australian published works and their authors, has recently registered its one-millionth work record and houses over 75 curated datasets, including BlackWords, a dataset of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander story-telling. Together, the two datasets form one of the Academy of Humanities’ 50 Discoveries in 50 years. Similarly, Creative Australia (formerly the Australia Council for the Arts) holds data covering its five decades of activity. While these databases need to be separately maintained for disciplinary-specific research and privacy reasons, developing their interoperability is crucial not only for the researchers who study our cultural history but also for the policy makers, artists and authors who will shape our futures.

This project’s overarching aim is to augment Australia’s cultural data capabilities.