Digital collections catalyst

The Digital collections catalyst is awarded annually to projects that use computational methods, such as machine learning, generative AI, and other tools with State Library’s digital collections and/or collections data, to deliver an innovative and creative digital experience. 

The program supports highly creative and experimental ideas that bring together technology with cultural heritage to inspire Queenslanders through State Library collections.

The successful recipient receives a stipend of $15,000 and premium access to State Library’s extensive collections and library staff expertise.

Evelyn Saunders was awarded the 2024 Digital collection catalyst for her project, Min(d)ing the dead.

Min(d)ing the Dead is an online interactive documentary about a renowned “ghost” town that, during Covid, became the largest gold mine in Queensland. Part film, part book and part photo album, it explores what happens to a community when a historic gold mining town, heritage, and ghost-busting tourist destination becomes a born-again mine.

On track to match Ravenswood's past century-and-a-half of gold acquisition in the next fourteen years, mining operations have expanded and a two-kilometre wall now inhibits direct access to the local cemetery. Remains found in previously undiscovered graves near the school have been relocated to the cemetery, a new school has been built, and three one-hundred-year-old masonry chimneys that had been slated for demolition have been carefully removed to an undisclosed location inside the mine’s footprint. This project does not seek to criticise, but, rather, to document the Ravenswood story up to and including 2023/2024.

Brett Tweedie is a data visualisation designer with degrees in media and politics, and has been making stuff online since the late 90s.

He was a Google News Lab Fellow (2018), shortlisted for the DX Lab Fellowship at the State Library of NSW (2019) and has produced a range of work for organisations in the GLAM sector, most recently creating We Are What We Steal for the State Library of New South Wales.

He has also worked with the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS), the Museum of Australian Democracy (MoAD), and media organisations such as the ABC, The Australian Financial Review, The Conversation, and The Guardian.