PANEL 3 - CONVICTION POLITICS: LIBERATING THE CONVICT ARCHIVE
My Session Status
CHAIR: Ciara Chambers (Zoom link for discussion: https://uqam.zoom.us/j/84658429475)
Unshackling Convict Australia: How Transmedia is Re-Evaluating and Democratising the Archive of British Empire’s Transported Convicts
Transmedia is a term developed and championed by media studies scholars such as Henry Jenkins, who examined how digital convergence enabled stories, or research, to unfold over multiple avenues offering users a non-linear, multi-dimensional, self-directed pathway of discovery. What of transmedia’s value to historical research, interactive archive interpretation and accessibility and communication? I explore this potential through the example of Conviction Politics: the convict routes of Australian democracy, a digital history project I lead exploring the contribution of transported convicts – especially convicts sentenced for protests and political crimes – to Australian political and social democracy, the labour movement and national self-determination. Engaging with digitised and analogue archives from collections around the world, the project has created an online transmedia hub to converge, curate and disseminate a diversity of media – mini-screen documentaries, podcasts, data visualisations, long reads, short reads, songs, and archive images and documents – for sharing by our international team of investigators and partners such as government archives, museums, unions and public schools and to disperse findings to stakeholders and the public across multiple delivery platforms. The Conviction Politics transmedia hub not only communicates project outcomes but is a model for enabling online transnational archive research, media making and education collaboration, appropriate for an inherently transnational topic – the global mobility of political convicts and their activism, linking the UK, Ireland, Europe, North America and the wider empire to the Australian colonies.
“'We are all alike’: The Collective Visualization of Female Convict Lives
The convicts landed in Eastern Australia were documented in extraordinary detail. Yet, the ‘big data’ generated by nineteenth century systems of surveillance was sufficiently complex to defy attempts to explore the ways in which the lives of the transported intersected. In part this was intentional. The principal bureaucratic tool employed to regulate convict labour, the Conduct Records, were conceived as a means of documenting individual transgressions. Personal offending histories were used to assess the suitability of applicants for receipt of indulgences, or to single out those whose conduct warranted disciplinary action. This paper uses coded transcript of 72,000 court summaries detailed in the female Conduct Records held by the Tasmanian Archives. With the aid of network analysis and other digital techniques it explores the links between individual prosecutions, revealing both the collective nature of many transgressions, and the web of collusion that bound convict women one to another.
Archives of Emotion? Reading Absences and Contest in Transnational Context
What emotions, and who’s emotions have been archived? This paper discusses what a focus on emotion in archival research brings to light on Chartist and Young Ireland political prisoners who were transported to the Australian colonies from the UK in the mid-nineteenth century. I contend that a turn to emotion expands the archive by offering alternative histories of contest and an understanding of how memory has been shaped. In this paper I refer to the National Archives in London, convict archives in Tasmania which in 2007 were included in the UNESCO Memory of the World International Register, and Trove, the National Library of Australia’s digital archive, to illustrate how the politics and memory of these political prisoners has been contested, shaped and forgotten. As official narratives rarely record emotions “from below” and convict records seldom referred to emotion, there is a need to read absence and turn to media forms created by the political prisoners and the communities they came from. With national funding cuts threatening the survival of Trove, efforts of democratising the convict archive, and the Conviction Politics multimedia hub, are vital for sustaining research and historical approaches from below.