Cirrus@Austlit

'This essay considers how feature writing, with its attractive layout and graphics, and its attention to the stylistic and narrative pleasures of the text, has made the transition from print magazines to online magazine websites, thriving in both written and multimedia forms. Adopting Steensen’s definition of features as a ‘a family of genres that address a similar exigence but differ in rhetorical form’ (2010: 133), I consider the transformations and resilience of features online, together with the different sites that

have developed for their publication, including print news and magazine websites, specific online magazines exclusively commissioning features, feature aggregator sites,

and the more recently produced feature disaggregator sites. Looking at some examples of features online, the essay considers whether the accessibility and adaptability of the form may enhance its status as both journalism and writing. The article ends by asking if the integration of the core, factual narrative text, with documentary audio, video,

slide shows and linking material, might constitute a kind of ‘aesthetic journalism’ (Cramerotti 2009). ' (Publication abstract)

'AustLit is an important destination for those researching in the field of Australian literary studies. As a vehicle for periodical studies, AustLit provides invaluable resources in the form of indexes to the literary content of many magazines, newspapers and scholarly journals; the history, editorship and purpose of many small and large periodicals; and collections of records that demonstrate a particular aspect of the history of Australian periodical publishing and readership. As a virtual research environment, AustLit provides researchers with tools for creating, aggregating and annotating collections of relevant data and for publishing these datasets as scholarly outcomes of research projects. Amongst other AustLit supported research projects, Jill Julius Matthews, for example, used AustLit as a publication vehicle for her historical survey, 1895–1930, on the collection of magazines in the State Library of New South Wales’s Mitchell Library.

'This paper will present some of the ways that AustLit has engaged with historical research into Australian magazine and newspaper culture, presenting the outcomes of projects that have, collectively, built our understanding of the important role periodicals have played. It will show how AustLit is embedded in the wider research environment and discuss how scholars and others can use AustLit as a site for their own research outcomes, foreshadowing some of the options becoming available as a result of a major restructure of the database and interface. ' (Publication abstract)

'For much of the 20th century, homosexuality was illegal in Australia. The country was also subject to draconian censorship; overt homosexual works were banned. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, social change was afoot and publications of the homosexual rights and gay liberation movements began to appear, soon joined by more commercial publications aligned to an increasingly overt gay sub-culture. These publications prospered over the next three decades. Their focus ranged from earnest

proselytising to post-modern pornography. Most maintained strong links to their readerships, even though many of them were distributed free of charge and relied on

advertising to survive. This paper chronicles the range of these publications and examines how they helped develop and foster a gay, lesbian or queer readership (and

hence outside the mainstream); explores how and why the printed forms of these publications gradually merged within the mainstream as same-sex relationships lost their deviance; and notes that these publications have largely been replaced by digital alternatives in the 21st century. ' (Publication abstract)