Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 Using Lives : The Australian Dictionary of Biography and It's Related Corpora
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) is one of many biographical dictionary projects developing advanced biographical functions. The ADB is the largest and longest-running project of national collaboration of social scientists in Australia, having started in the late 1950s. Over 4,500 authors have contributed to its 13,500 entries. In 2006 the ADB made the cultural journey from a printed book to an online digital research resource. Since then staff have created companion biographical websites: Obituaries Australia, which reproduces published obituaries; and People Australia, which features other biographical material such as records from Who’s Who and out-of-copyright compendiums of biography. People Australia also acts as a Biographical Register. These companion websites now give us the technical capacity to register all deceased Australians in our websites. Since 2011 we have also begun to comprehensively index all entries, which, in turn, allows us to automatically generate visualisation tools, such as family trees.' 

 (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon ‘True Biographies of Nations?’ The Cultural Journeys of Dictionaries of National Biography Karen Fox (editor), Canberra : Australian National University Press , 2019 16950189 2019 anthology criticism

    'Dictionaries of national biography are a long-established and significant genre of biographical and historical writing, existing in many forms across the globe. This book brings together practitioners from around the English‑speaking world to reflect on national biographical dictionary projects’ recent cultural journeys, and the challenges presented to them by such developments as the transition to a digital environment, a new alertness to the need to represent diversity, and the rise of transnationalism. Exploring their paths forward, the chapters of this book collectively make a powerful argument for the continued value and importance of large‑scale collaborative biographical dictionary research.' (Publication summary)

    Canberra : Australian National University Press , 2019
    pg. 79-97
Last amended 19 Jul 2019 10:51:25
79-97 Using Lives : The Australian Dictionary of Biography and It's Related Corporasmall AustLit logo
X