Events

The Fraser Oration (postponed from 2021): Dr Geoff Raby AO on Leadership and an Independent Australian Foreign Policy.

Australia’s former Ambassador to China, Dr Geoff Raby AO, will speak on “Leadership and an Independent Australian Foreign Policy” at the Fraser Oration, to be held online on 17 February.

After 27 years in the Australian public service and serving as Australia’s Ambassador to China from 2007 to 2011, Dr Raby now heads Geoff Raby and Associates, a Beijing-based strategic advisory company.

The Fraser Oration - established in 2017 by the University of Melbourne in memory of Malcolm Fraser, the 22nd Prime Minister of Australia - provides an opportunity to explore matters of public and social interest in line with Fraser’s vision for Australia, and his support for multiculturalism, universal democratic principles, human rights, and free speech.

From Minister for the Army during the Vietnam War to becoming a practitioner and advocate of an independent foreign policy for Australia, Fraser’s public life traced an arc that confounded his critics on both sides of politics.

Towards the end of Fraser’s public life, this once arch cold war warrior labelled the United States of America as Australia’s most dangerous ally.

This year’s Fraser Oration will explore the imperative for Australia to rediscover its own voice in world affairs, as Malcolm Fraser sought to do.

To attend this event, register for the webinar link via the Book Now button above.

In the interests of moving towards an in-person (and online) event, we present confirmed new dates: Friday 18th & Saturday 19th February 2022

Submission of proposals 1 December 2021

Submissions invited from Humanities, Social Sciences, Arts, Computing, Sociology, Anthropology, Library and Heritage Studies for panels, presentations and demonstrations at the Digital Studio, University of Melbourne and online. Topics may include:

• The politics of small data: How does small data resist colonising or imperial trajectories: data production and industries, data and subjectivity and what is ‘smart’ data?
• Methodologies of small data as research in different disciplines: Collecting as little as possible: how small is small? How do you organise small data? And mix it with other narratives or collections? What does partial or aberrant data reveal?
• Small data art, performance and aesthetics: does miniaturisation lead to new ways of seeing or imagining? Data as ritual, the performance of bio-data, and the body as data.
• Ethics and histories of small data curation: the close-up, the fragment, the short distance, privacy and initimacy or disruptions from data instances

Taking inspiration from the ‘small is beautiful’ mantra of the 1970s which provoked counter-cultural economic and scientific expertise in the name of planetary survival, this symposium invites scholars working on computational methods in the arts, humanities and social sciences to discuss their research with ‘small data’.
Big data is often characterised by the volume, speed and aggregation made possible by automated and intensive computational systems, and over the last decade, data scraping methods and ‘large N’ studies have become dominant trends in socio-cultural digital research. Conversely, small data may be characterised by their limited volume or greater diversity of anomalous patterns, case studies, and research collected manually to answer specific questions.
This concept of “small is beautiful” has a distinctive history and place in the humanities and creative arts, producing specific (if not unique) works and critical commentary in archives tied to the authorial or artistic signature. From a social science perspective, small data may be associated with some forms of qualitative methods, marginalia, ephemera, data that ‘glows’ or narrative analysis of ‘small stories’. Moreover digital platforms with readily accessible technologies are recomposing scale in unprecedented ways. Such approaches give rise to new possibilities for mass circulation of intimate gestures and the affordances of transnational and first person voices that may not identify with colonising structures or professional institutions of art, culture and political organisation.

Hosted by the Australian Cultural Data Engine, the Narrative Network and the Victorian College for the Arts, this interdisciplinary symposium seeks to nurture and advance our understanding of small data that involves human-scale analyses, thinking about aesthetics, and exploring how narratives emerge from data patterns and their anomalies. Key questions guiding the event are: how do interactions with small data shape and inspire transformations of knowledge in the twenty-first century? Who collects, owns and curates small data? And when and where does small data hold power? What kind of actions, or play, are possible with small data? Which stories can be told with small data?

We are excited to announce confirmed keynote speakers:

Professor Katherine Bode (ANU), author of A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History (Michigan 2018)

Professor Roopika Risam (Salem, US), author of The Digital Black Atlantic (Minnesota 2021)

Professor Lisa Blackman, (Goldsmiths, London), author of Haunted Data: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science (Bloomsbury 2019).

Rowan McNaught, (Melbourne), artist and publisher of artworks, software, anthologies, documentation, secrets and correspondence (Darpa press)

The Organising Committee at Melbourne includes Dr Tyne Sumner (SCC), Dr Signe Ravn (SSPS), Dr Danny Butt (VCA), Dr Ashley Barnwell (SSPS) and Professor Rachel Fensham (SCC)