Unlocking AustLit: Navigating Australia’s digital literary platform for research

AustLit is Australia’s most longstanding piece Digital Humanities research infrastructure. In this presentation and workshop, Associate Professor Maggie Nolan and Dr Catriona Mills will provide an overview of the AustLit platform and its extensive functionality. The presenters will then lead a workshop on how to use AustLit in their own research projects. AustLit has over a million records; regardless of your research area, there will be content applicable to what you do.

Facilitators

Dr Maggie Nolan is the Director of AustLit and an Associate Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage in the School of Communication and Arts at UQ. Her research focuses on representation of race and ethnicity in Australian culture, contemporary Indigenous writing, hoaxes and imposture, reading and reception. She is a CI on an ARC Discovery Project, Close Relations: Irishness in Australian literature that uses traditional and computational methods to explore the role of Irishness in the construction of the Australian literary field.

Dr Catriona Mills is the Content Manager for AustLit, and has held various roles with the platform since 2010. For AustLit, she has collaborated on a range of research projects, including Beyond Goggles and Corsets: Australian Steampunk, the Miles Franklin International Rights Project, Australian Writing and Rock Music, and COVID-19 in the Australian Arts. A nineteenth-century scholar by training, she has also published widely on genre fiction and Doctor Who.