Future Feminist Archive has been working hard to build connections between local archives and local feminist histories. The aim is to uncover forgotten archives and facilitate an increase in visibility for Australia’s women artists, past and present.

As part of FFA, well-known artist Fiona MacDonald is researching Vivienne Binns’ Full Flight (1981 – 83), addressing it as a feminist prototype for contemporary participatory practices. This project consisted of Binns living in an “Art Caravan” for two years and travelling from Lithgow to Lake Cargelligo in central New South Wales. Throughout this journey, she observed and engaged with the creative expression of local communities.

Please see this link: http://contemporaryartandfeminism.com/2015/07/15/call-out-full-flight-participants-1980-198/

If your name appears, Fiona wants your art historical musings! Please get in touch via the CAF Facebook page

Check out this video of Gil at the AGNSW Future Feminist Archive event on June 15. She is talking through how the DAAO works and how to upload data.

On Saturday 20 June, DAAO was in Brisbane conducting a data-sprint and test of our new edit interface. Success on both fronts! We had the most wonderfully diligent crew comprising Rachael and the boxcopy gang (Zoe and Cameron), Paul Andrew from the Remix Project https://www.daao.org.au/projects/remixorgau-project/ , who brought along artist and writer Virginia Barrett  https://www.daao.org.au/bio/virginia-barratt/personal_details/ and together they worked on adding a bit more QLD performance art history into DAAO. Paul, one of our moderators, also helped trained other artists and academics who came along.

We hit our initial target of 20 emerging Queensland artist records associated with boxcopy in 3 hours! The records we worked on can be found here. https://www.daao.org.au/projects/boxcopy-data-push/ . It was a really fun day.  Thanks boxcopy.

The other reason for this data push was to test our new edit interface. This is the part of the website where members enter information into the database. DAAO is a complex database and so it’s vital that it be easy to use. If our user interface isn’t clear, members get frustrated, data gets entered incorrectly and thus the quality of our data and community suffers. Over this past year, we’ve been working hard with many research communities getting our hands dirty by actively using the database WITH our communities so we can get a clear picture of where we need to enhance or change the user experience of the site. We’ve been gathering feedback from meetings and training sessions with academic researchers, artists, designers and curators, and then redeveloping aspects of the site based on these sessions.

Last week we did a big deployment that addressed many of the issues that members were experiencing with the edit form and boxcopy was our first test of the new edit interface. It was a really gratifying experience: after about 15 minutes, I was more or less redundant, everyone registered and just started creating or enhancing records, creating links between artists and groups, creating new exhibition records, we even started linking images! It was more or less seamless. The new interface only slightly alters the old one but in a few significant ways 1. It makes creating new works, exhibition, recognitions etc a one step process (cutting out the awkward two step process we had before) 2. It has streamlined the EDIT buttons so they are easily to find. 3. it has made version history more obvious. Each of these changes has clearly had an impact if the boxcopy session is a good guide. We will continue to monitor these changes in upcoming sessions.

Thank you to all the researchers and research institutes, such as the Australian Institute of Art History, artists (in particular the Artist Run Initiatives, such as Fontanelle , Gray St Workshop  and boxcopy), art colleges like the National Art School,  curators, such as Gemma Weston from Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, and the Contemporary Art and Feminism Project who have involved themselves so enthusiastically in the DAAO the past year by hosting training and feedback sessions, talks and data pushes. Each of these feedback sessions has been invaluable to improving DAAO’s content and design which was a key component of our project this year.

DAAO and Contemporary Art and Feminism have been working together to lift the visibility of women working in the arts, past and present.

CAF is a multi-faceted project calling on artists, writers, students and thinkers with a passion for art and feminism. Through real and virtual activism, the project aims to reclaim historically overlooked artists and work toward a more vibrant, egalitarian future.

On June 15, the Art Gallery of New South Wales will be hosting a Future Feminist Archive Symposium and How to DAAO workshop, led by Dr Gillian Fuller.

One of the central aims of Future Feminist Archive is finding ways to recover lost archives, to stock-take existing records, and to generate new ideas for curating and archiving.

DAAO is a valuable tool for realising these goals and for building a more collaborative research community. The database holds over 15,000 person records and is continually expanding. The workshop is the perfect introduction to e-research and is open to anyone and everyone. You can help to redress the gender imbalance in web content by sharing accurate and useful information on Australian art and design.

To register for the free seminar please email: joholder@aic.net.au

Here is a photograph of Gill in command at the Wollongong Art Gallery on May 10.

DAAO is hitting the road! Dr Gillian Fuller will be leading a series of site testing and training workshops across the country from May through to July 2015.

Gillian will be running sessions on how the DAAO works, how to get involved and how the database supports new approaches to research. She will also be leading data salons, which are a great way of bringing your research community together.

The research and testing roadshow is all about gathering feedback from the community on our current site developments. In addition to building long-term scholarly relationships, we are enhancing the site’s social features and improving researcher functionality. As we are constantly working towards a more substantial and relevant coverage of Australian art, we need to ensure that we are meeting the needs of the DAAO community.

As funding tightens, user-driven models of preserving our cultural heritage are becoming increasingly important. These sessions are the perfect introduction to e-research and digital humanities. In a rapidly changing academic environment, online visibility is the key to launching a successful career. If you are interested in hosting an event, please contact: daao@unsw.edu.au

Here is a list of preliminary dates. More to come!

Design & Art Australia Online will be undertaking two major upgrades over the next fortnight or so. The DAAO will unavailable intermittently on these dates:

Thursday 23rd April 2015 – 9am to 3pm.

Friday 1st May 2015 – 4pm to 7pm.

A key deliverable of our current LIEF grant is to refine DAAO’s Events and Works schema to better match researcher queries.

While this is a refinement, not a rebuild,  the team has put considerable effort into ensuring that proposed changes are fit for purpose and meet accepted standards.  Dr Anne Cregan, our Semantic Adviser,  established our approach of reviewing the data model in full, rather than focussing exclusively on Events and Works entities.  This approach means any change is considered against the bigger picture and other possible future needs that are out of scope of this current LIEF.   Somaya Langley, our Data Manager, further developed the proposed refinements, referencing the FRBR00 conceptual model to help us respond to questions like ‘How do we accurately represent work that is performative, temporally and spatially extended, or iterative in nature?’. *Note that we have not adopted the FRBRoo model in full,  that would be a massive and complex undertaking.  We’re simply using the model as a guide for our Works/Events changes.

Click diagram for full-scale view.

DAAO Data Model - Proposed Revisions (February 2015)

These refinements are based on feedback from CIs and DAAO users.  Some of the questions and issues the model responds to include:

• How to collect data where the line between a WORK and an EVENT becomes blurred, such as in performative work.
• How to collect data on groups of WORKS such as series, installations made up of many WORKS, WORKS that evolve into new WORKS, ‘impermanent or abstract groupings.’
• How to collect complex relationships between groups of EVENTS while not locking the user in to a predefined hierarchy.
• How to collect data where the line between an EVENT and a RECOGNITION become blurred.
• How to collect data on collectives and organisations that work together.
• How to correctly attribute and show collaboration between DAAO artists/designers and non-artists or international artists for whom we do not collect full records.
• How to represent critical response to WORKS and EVENTS.
• How to investigate where Exhibition funding comes from.
• How to record more less concrete relationships between people, such as ‘Protege of/Mentor of’, Influenced/Influenced by’ etc.

We’re very excited to be working with two of our LIEF partners, The University of Melbourne (Prof Jaynie Anderson and A/Prof Alison Inglis) and Deakin University (Prof Deb Verhoeven), on this upcoming event.  We’ll post more details shortly.

DIGITAL HUMANITIES: WHERE DOES ART FIT IN?
The Australian Institute Of Art History
5 June 2015

Prof Deb Verhoeven
Deb Verhoeven is Professor and Chair of Media and Communication at Deakin University, She is also Director of the Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI) project, a national linked data initiative that unites and unlocks Australia’s cultural datasets.

Dr Gillian Fuller
Gillian Fuller is Visiting Research Scholar at National Institute of Experimental Arts, UNSW and former Research Director of Design &  Art Australia Online.

We’ve been hearing a lot about e-research and Digital Humanities in recent years. Coupled with these term are other terms, equally opaque, such as metadata, virtual laboratories, data mapping. Then come the acronyms, NLA, DAAO, HUNI, RDF,SQL, API. It seems so removed from established research practices in Humanities. In this talk Verhoeven and Fuller will discuss how data-driven research is being used in the creative arts and showcase two leading digital humanities projects in the area: Design & Art Australia Online and HuNI (Humanities Networked Infrastructure).

We will also address three pressing issues for Digital Humanities:

• Representation: ensuring Australia’s cultural heritage is preserved and visible.
• Methods of Analysis; what can you do with cultural data? What kind of research does it afford? And what critical discussions need to be had about data driven methods?
• Participation and engagement:  What do we really mean by this?

HUNI
HuNI (Humanities Networked Infrastructure) is a national Virtual Laboratory project developed as part of the Australian government’s NeCTAR (National e-Research Collaboration Tools and Resources) program. HuNI combines information from 30 of Australia’s most significant cultural datasets covering more than 2 million authoritative records relating to the people, organisations, objects and events that make up Australia’s rich cultural heritage. HuNI also enables researchers to work with and share this large-scale aggregation of cultural information.

DAAO
Design & Art Australia Online (DAAO) is a collaborative e-Research tool built upon the foundations of the Dictionary of Australian Artists Online. DAAO is an open source freely accessible scholarly e-Research tool that presents biographical data about Australian artists, designers, craftspeople and curators.

How are these for some happy stats!?  These figures from the National Library of Australia show that DAAO is the second largest contributor of PEOPLE records to Trove.  DAAO is second only to Libraries Australia, which draws on the Australian National Bibliographic Database, bringing together records from libraries throughout Australia

Content partners with more than 1000 identities – March 2015

Congratulations to all DAAO content contributors.  Now, do you think we can get to position number one?