Resourceful Reading re-examines and re-invigorates Australian literary criticism and history by integrating traditional, qualitative approaches to literary studies with empirically-rich methodologies including data-mining and quantitative analysis. This community aims to contribute to AustLit as well as to maximize the potential of this important, data-rich resource.
Data resulting from five separate but linked research projects was the digital end product of Resourceful Reading.
The five linked projects were :
– Professor Gillian Whitlock's Late 20th Century Anthologies
– Professor Gillian Whitlock's Asylum Seeker Narratives
– Professor Robert Dixon's Australian Literature in the 'Translation Zone'
– Professor Leigh Dale's Australian Newspaper Reviews of 1930
– Dr. Katherine Bode's Reading by Numbers
More information on each project can be found in the individual project pages.
Professor Gillian Whitlock's component of Resourceful Reading focuses on processes of selection, connection and interpretation of texts in critical anthologies in Australian literature. AustLit was used to explore an identified increase in the publication of anthologies late last century and the role of the anthology in the debates about Australian literature, culture and society.
Two case studies were developed:
Professor Whitlock's book chapter discusses the results of this project.
Increasingly, it seems that overseas rights and translation contracts are initiated by publishers and their scouts at events such as the Frankfurt and London trade fairs. Are these commercial arrangements similar throughout the world or do they vary from one culture to another? As if confirming Lawrence Venuti's claim for the translator's 'invisibility', there is, to date, no systematic, empirically-informed account of this translation zone in Australian literary scholarship.
This part of Resourceful Reading aims to answer some of these research questions by populating the metaphor of the 'translation zone' with real data.
Professor Dixon has argued for the value of thinking about Australian writing as belonging not just to the nation but also to an expanded field in which national literatures come into being in complex and competitive relations between what Pascale Casanova calls the literary province and world literary space. Central to the cultural economy of this expanded field is the role of the translator, so often rendered invisible, as Venuti has observed.
Australian writers and Australian literature have never been confined to the boundaries of the nation, but are implicated in what Emily Apter calls the translation zone, which she describes as a broad intellectual topography that is neither the property of a single nation, nor an amorphous condition associated with postnationalism, but rather a zone of critical engagement that connects the 'L' and the 'N' of transLation and transNation. Literary influences, intellectual formations, careers in writing, and the processes of editing, publication, translation, reception and reputation-making take place both within and beyond the nation, and in more than one language.
Resourceful Reading : The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture
Katherine Bode
(editor),
Robert Dixon
(editor),
Sydney
:
Sydney University Press
,
2009
Z1663702
2009
anthology
criticism
'This collection provides the first comprehensive account of eResearch and the new empiricism as they are transforming the field of Australian literary studies in the twenty-first century...The essays range from accounts of the state of the discipline in its international contexts with a particular focus on future directions, to exemplary applications of empirical methods by leading critics and scholars. Reports on current large-scale online projects that represent a significant future direction of literary studies in Australia are also included. Together, they demonstrate the possibilities and the range of new empirical and electronic approaches to Australian literary studies.' (Source: back cover)
Reading by Numbers : Recalibrating the Literary Field
New York (City)
:
Anthem Press
,
2012
Z1874845
2012
single work
criticism
'Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field is the first book to use digital humanities strategies to integrate the scope and methods of book and publishing history with issues and debates in literary studies. By mining, visualising and modelling data from 'AustLit' - an online bibliography of Australian literature that leads the world in its comprehensiveness and scope - this study revises established conceptions of Australian literary history, presenting new ways of writing about literature and publishing and a new direction for digital humanities research. The case studies in this book offer insight into a wide range of features of the literary field, including trends and cycles in the gender of novelists, the formation of fictional genres and literary canons, and the relationship of Australian literature to other national literatures.'
