Receding visions of pastoral idyll : an ethnographic and photographic study of marginal farming in the Maranoa

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.Farming is a practice that is exemplified by a set of particular activities, which include purposeful engagements with things, background knowledge, know-how, emotions and goals. From the formation of a British colony in New South Wales, this practice has been framed by a particular conception of ideal engagement with the land. Political support for this ideal led to the generation of an economic environment within which family farming was first underwritten by successive Australian governments and later abandoned. Within the marginal farming landscapes of the Maranoa, in south west Queensland, progressive depletion of soils that are unsuited to intensive production, within a landscape subject to drought, has left the heirs to this ideal without any possibility of realising the ‘good life’ for which they have been striving. Both the land, and the families that work it, are exhausted. This thesis presents an extended ethnographic and photographic documentary study of marginal farming families in south west Queensland. It draws on history, especially narratives and images made of farming landscapes in colonial Australia, to account for the disposition of these farmers for hard work, self-reliance, and frugal living, as well as their commitment to an ordering of the landscape in the service of production. Interpretation of the fieldwork data has been informed by theoretical texts from phenomenology, philosophy of technology and practice theory. The desperate circumstances of small family farmers, who have been marginalised within the physical, economic and political landscapes that they inhabit, are communicated in this thesis through documentary photography and ethnographic exegesis

Copyright from Inside the Box: A View from the U.S. Copyright Office

Good morning. I want to thank Professors Ginsburg and Besek for inviting me to speak today and introducing me. I also want to thank everyone at the Kernochan Center and the Journal of Law and the Arts for their assistance. It’s always a pleasure to be here—a block from where I grew up. And an entire event about copyrightability, what a wonderful thing. This topic is usually covered in just a couple minutes in a panel, but I really want to welcome you to my world at the U.S. Copyright Office. I’d also like to take a moment for a pitch for a twenty-first century Copyright Office as well. This is a picture of the Office as it appeared in the 1920s, so we are actually not still using typewriters. This is a more current view of my office that, on a daily basis, examines more claims than the federal courts review in any given year. The issues that come up are enormously varied and complex. But where we start our assessment of copyrightability in the Office is where we start when we first begin studying copyright law, and where we start when we’re teaching copyright with our students—back to the basic principles of copyright, and some of the seminal cases on creativity

Visualising text-based data: Identifying the potential of visual knowledge production through design practice

An increase in the availability of digitised data coupled with the development of digital tools has enabled humanities scholars to visualise data in ways that were previously difficult, if not impossible. While digitisation has led to an increase in the use of methods that chart, graph and map text-based data, opportunities for visual methods that are non-aggregative remain underdeveloped. In this paper we use ‘Writing Rights’, a collaborative project between design and humanities scholars that examines the process of writing the ‘Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen’ (1789), to explore this issue. Through a series of visual experiments we discuss how the production of knowledge is enacted textually, within the written language, and graphically with the visual arrangement of the text. We argue that by drawing on the domain expertise of design, with its commitment to the semantic potential of the visual, practices that more wholly account for the qualitative nature of humanities data can be developed

Graphic criticism and the material possibilities of digital texts

© 2018 The Author(s). Narratives of material loss are often attributed to the process of digitising cultural heritage collections. Not being able to physically hold a literary artefact denies the reader an embodied understanding of the text made possible through tangible and contextual cues. What the artefact feels like-the dimensions, weight, volume, and paper quality-and where it is located-the institution, collection, shelf, or archival box-all play a role in the production of textual meaning. Thus, the argument stands that by removing these cues certain ways of knowing a text are diminished. The process of digitisation, however, is not solely one of loss. Scholars working with digital texts are finding new ways to search, model, analyse, and rearrange written language, and in doing so are benefiting from the interpretive possibilities of textual mutability. While some scholars are taking advantage of digital materiality through computational text analysis, far less attention has been paid to the non-verbal materialities of a text, which also play a role in the production of meaning. To explore the potential of these non-verbal materialities, we take a digitised version of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; or, The Whale and alter graphic features of the page such as line length, type size, leading, white space, and tracking. Through a critical design practice we show how altering these non-verbal elements can reveal textual qualities that are difficult to access by close reading, and, in doing so, create new, hybrid works that are part literary page, part information visualisation