By bringing together 60 historic data sources documenting Tasmania’s 60 years as a penal colony, and integrating the results in a digital art project, a team of researchers aims to provide new insights into the lives of the island’s convicts.
The project’s lead, UNE historian Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, says the project will draw on a multi-source database containing about two million records to look “not just down the grain of a person’s life, but at their connections to other people and places throughout their lives”.
The results will be made publicly available through a smartphone-accessible digital installation in Hobart’s Penitentiary Chapel, managed by National Trust Tasmania. A proportion of admittance proceeds will go towards maintaining and refining the Tasmanian Longitudinal Dataset that will power the installation.
“We’ve designed this project to serve a number of complementary purposes,” Prof. Maxwell-Stewart says. “It allows us to sustain the database, while upgrading the Penitentiary Chapel and drawing more visitors to it.”
“These practical outcomes emerge from the process of helping people better understand Tasmania’s history as a penal colony and the people who lived in it.”
The work is backed by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Grant of $540,500. Research specialists from UNE, Monash University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the National Trust Tasmania are collaborating on the project.
Maxwell-Stewart observes that while the project starts with the historian’s desire to better understand the past, it will deliver its results to the public through a multidisciplinary integration of history, computing science, art, architecture and a dash of entrepreneurialism.
The project’s foundation is the Tasmanian Longitudinal Dataset, which represents about 30 years work to aggregate 60 different sets of data and intricately cross-reference them. The dataset is dominated by convict records, Maxwell-Stewart says, “but we've also got a complete run of Tasmanian 19th century births, deaths and marriages and many medical records and crime reports as well as street directories, property valuations and even bank account details”.
It isn’t merely the fact that the records exist, he notes, but the work has been done to map the relationships between them. This networked data has already yielded some unique insights. For instance, in a previous project, researchers used the data to show that each day a convict women spent in solitary confinement shortened life expectancy by 10 days.
This trove of information is being made available to the public through a novel digital installation in Hobart’s Penitentiary Chapel.
An ever-changing display of convict names will flow down an inverted obelisk suspended from the chapel’s ceiling. Visitors will be able to engage with the records through their smartphones. By choosing a name – one they are personally interested in or selected at random – the viewer will be able to review the people and places that person was known to have interacted with over the years.
The experience will extend into the spatial. When users visit other sites that their chosen individual lived or laboured in, the information on their phone will update to reflect the individual’s networks in the new location.
In the case of well-documented convicts, users will start to get a sense of vanished communities, kinships, employers and employees and interactions with government.
The nature of penal colony record-keeping means that individuals are not evenly represented in the data. Maxwell-Stewart observes that large numbers of interactions were recorded for about 15% of convicts who were prosecuted on multiple occasions. Smaller numbers of interactions were recorded for about 40%, and the rest “largely just glided through the system without incident”.
On release, too, the civic record can be spotty or silent. This is especially the case for those who left Tasmania. “But we have some imaginative ways of filling in the gaps,” says Maxwell-Stewart.
Digital art will add an extra layer of ambience to the experience in the chapel. For instance, one branch of the Tasmanian Longitudinal Dataset carries daily information on the weather from 1838. It is thus possible to recreate the weather on any particular day of the year through projections.
The entrepreneurial aspect of the project lies in its reinvestment of a portion of chapel admission fees into maintenance and development of the Tasmanian Longitudinal Dataset. Funding to maintain databases is difficult to obtain, but without maintenance the data can disappear or become trapped in obsolete hardware. “While digital data opens up a huge range of research avenues, it is notoriously hard to maintain,” Maxwell-Stewart says.
Maxwell-Stewart has many other questions he wants to extract from the dataset.
For instance, what was the effect on longevity of growing up near the Hobart rivulet?
Or, more ambitiously, does the criminal prosecution record of one generation elevate prosecution risk in subsequent generations? “A lot of my friends in criminology are interested in the factors which perpetuate or break patterns in familial offending,” Prof. Maxwell-Stewart says.
UNE historian Associate Professor David Roberts, who is leading a digital heritage agenda for the University’s Department of Archaeology, Classics and History and is a collaborator says the project represents a major leap forward for the way in which History is studied and taught at the UNE.
"We’re not just excited by the research opportunities that flow from these types of industry partnerships," Roberts says. "There is scope here for developing new, non-traditional curricula. We need to equip our students with the skills in data curation and associated digital technologies that they need for future careers in history and heritage industries’
