Lightning Talks

Finding Queerness in the Making of Infinite Colours

What does it mean to draw from games to create art? My latest work 'Infinite Colours' draws data from 2,499 queer independent games. Each game adds a unique shape and colour onto the canvas, and plays a unique string of notes. Over 8 hours, the canvas celebrates LGBTQIA+ independent videogames. In this talk I will present the motivation for creating ‘Infinite Colours’, and how to find meaning in a large collection.
____________________________

Dr Xavier Ho

Lecturer in Interaction Design, Monash University

Dr Xavier Ho is an award-winning creative practitioner and designer focusing on the queer independent games community. He is a Lecturer in Interaction Design at Monash University, Visiting Fellow in Sexuality Studies at the University of Sydney, and alumni of the ABC TOP 5 Arts media residency program. He initiated and led the curation of Pride at Play, a public queer exhibition that celebrates thoughtful LGBTQIA+ games in Oceania and the Asia Pacific.

Hacking GLAM Collections

I will be sharing my experiences ‘hacking’ data from GLAM institutions. This practice involves taking an experimental and playful approach to engaging with this data. The talk will include examples from my colleagues and myself that help to demonstrate how this practice can produce surprising, thought-provoking, and fun outcomes. I will talk about some of the practicalities of including this approach in your everyday work, and hopefully persuade you that hacking is something you should try for yourself.
____________________________

Sotirios Alpanis

Senior Data Engineer, State Library Victoria

Sotirios Alpanis has been working with data from GLAM institutions since 2010. This includes helping to make millions of pages of archive material online at the British Library, building digital collections repositories at Cogapp, and most recently working with a plethora of data at State Library Victoria. He is interested in thoughtful, interactive, and meaningful applications of emerging technologies that can enhance our understanding of GLAM collections, improve the experiences of his colleagues, and engage new and under-represented users.

What do you do with a billion words from Hansard?

The transcribed and digitised Proceedings of Federal Parliament consist of nearly a billion words recorded since 1901. The structure of the proceedings make it easy to find some specific things such as the second reading speeches for a specific bill, or the speeches by a particular person, but the very specificity of these affordances can obscure both the bigger picture of change over time, but also the smaller picture such as incidental references to local electorate matters. In this talk we will look at our work in progress examining how we can use computational methods on the proceedings-as-data to create more generous search interfaces that encourage generative exploration as well as the construction of more specific and useful search queries. We will show our in progress case study looking at the evolving nature of educational policy discussions in Australia in the last twenty years.
____________________________

Dr. Sam Hames

Post-doctural Research Fellow, University of Queensland

Dr. Sam Hames is a post-doctoral research fellow in computational humanities with UQ's School of Languages and Cultures. Sam's PhD was on machine learning for medical imaging analysis, and he has an extensive background as a data-focused software developer supporting social media and web researchers. His primary research focus is to understand how computation can enable new and old kinds of interpretive inquiry across the humanities.

Dr. Naomi Barnes

Senior Lecturer, University of Queensland

Dr Naomi Barnes is a Senior Lecturer interested in how crisis influences education politics. With a specific focus on moral panics, she has demonstrated how online communication has influenced education politics in Australia, the US and the UK. She has analysed and developed network models to show the effect of moral panics on the Australian curriculum and how it is taught. Naomi is also regularly asked to comment on how Australian teachers should respond to perceived threats to Australian nationalism, identity, and democracy.

Historical Fires Near Me: (Re)Constructing Colonial Ecological Records)

Borrowing from the identifiable and culturally resonant imagery of the Fires Near Me app, in this lightning talk I present my work in progress on an experimental interface that seeks to produce a cultural, and historical map of colonial Australian bushfires between 1850 and 1900. Drawing on over 110,000 newspaper articles and comprised of nearly half a million entries; this lightning talk summarises the workflow, tools and processes employed in the creation and curation of this dataset as well as exploring both the practical and ethical challenges of (re)constructing colonial data.
____________________________

Fiannuala Morgan

Lecturer in Publishing and Editing, University of Melbourne

Fiannuala Morgan is a Lecturer in Publishing and Editing at The University of Melbourne and comes from a background in the Information Services Industry where she been employed as a librarian and archivist for over a decade. Her research explores the possibilities that artificial intelligence yields for the analysis of digital colonial archives with a particular interest in the Australian colonial press. Some of her recent publications include the Cambridge Element Aboriginal Writers and Popular Fiction: The Literature of Anita Heiss (2021) and the edited collection Black Thursday and Other Lost Australian Bushfire Stories (2021).

The ARDC Community Data lab

The ARDC Community Data Lab is a program of work from the Australian Research Data Commons, a federally funded national digital research infrastructure facility. The Community Data Lab is a cornerstone in our emerging Humanities, Arts, Social Science and Indigenous Research Data Commons (HASS and Indigenous RDC), which is seeking to cohere communities of researchers around commons ways of working on digital collections as data held by the GLAM sector, and to connect them with modern, iterable ways of discovering, interpreting and building upon those collections. In this lightning talk we'll cover the work done in the first phase of the program centering on the Trove API, and explore the next phase of the program. The second phase seeks to extend beyond collections not currently harvested by Trove as well as the community of contributors to the program. We'll explain how an intentional process of co-design has brought together researchers, GLAM and digital research practitioners. We'll also detail how you can be involved as well.
____________________________

Tom Honeyman

Solutions Architect, Hass and Indigenous Research Data Commons (HASS&I RDC), Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC)

I work on solutions architecture for a broad array of national digital research infrastructures for the benefit of researchers in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, and Indigenous research communities in Australia. I have a past in field linguistics, as well as at PARADISEC, an archive of languages and music spoken and performed in Australia’s region.

Digital Twins and the future of the Built Environment

The concept of 'Digital Twins' in the context of the built environment represents a paradigm shift in how we conceive, construct, and interact with our physical surroundings. A digital twin, in essence, is a dynamic, virtual representation of a physical object or system, mirroring real-world conditions, processes, and life cycles. This presentation explores the transformative impact of digital twin technology on the field of architecture and urban design, focusing on its potential to revolutionize design methodologies, construction processes, and the ongoing management of built environments.
____________________________

Dr Fred Fialho Leandro Alves Teixeira

Senior Lecturer in design, University of Queensland

Dr Fred Fialho Teixeira has been working in the field of digital architecture for the last 15 years. His research focuses on spatial design through an intersection of new media and computational design strategies with a focus on biological paradigms. Presently he integrates the use of virtual reality and algorithmic design to enable a next-generation of sustainable architecture in terms of advanced manufacturing and cultural sustainability. 

Voices from the Collection

A practical exploration of the potential for AI dataset and model creation from State Library of Queensland’s unique oral history collection items, with a lightning overview of how to identify and evaluate state-of-the-art free and open-source Machine Learning software and leveraging LLMs to create a pipeline from collection items, to datasets, to generative speech models. 
____________________________

Andrei Maberley

Project Manager, Exhibitions, Queensland Museum

Andrei Maberley has 10 years of experience in community engagement, digital inclusion, and exhibitions at the State Library of Queensland, designing and delivering award-winning workshops in digital literacy for CALD communities, producing exhibitions highlighting the State Library's unique stories, and previously supervised State Library’s fabrication lab.

A/Professor Mark Lauchs

Associate Lecturer, QUT

Mark joined the School of Justice Studies as an Associate Lecturer in 2004. He previously worked in the Queensland state government in policy and project roles associated with accountability and the justice system. He completed a PhD on the history of public sector ethics and accountability in Queensland through Queensland University of Technology. Mark is the Coordinator of the Graduate Certificate in Policy and Governance. Most of Mark's current research focuses on Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. He is the former host of the New Books in Terrorism and Organised Crime podcast and the recipient of the 2021 John Oxley Library Honorary Fellowship.