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

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

Value the Edge: Permaculture as Counterculture in Australia

This paper reconsiders the story of permaculture, developed in Australia in the mid-1970s by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. This paper considers permaculture as an example of counterculture in Australia. In keeping with permaculture design ecological principles, we argue that today permaculture is best understood as part of an assemblage of design objects, bacteria, economies, humans, plants, technologies, actions, theories, mushrooms, policies, affects, desires, animals, business, material and immaterial labour and politics and that it can be read as contrapuntal rather than as oppositional practice. Contrapuntal insofar as it is not directly oppositional preferring to reframe and reorientate everyday practices. The paper is structured in three parts: in the first one we frame our argument by providing a background to our understanding of counterculture and assemblage; in the second we introduce the beginning of permaculture in its historical context, and in third we propose to consider permaculture as an assemblage

What things know: Exhibiting animism as artefact-based design research

This paper develops a way of evaluating designed artifacts as research. It focuses deliberately on design, on the generation of new knowledge that can happen when making things for use. It works with an account of the making process proposed by the literary philosopher, Elaine Scarry, as clarified by the sociologist of technology, Bruno Latour. Scarry argues that there is an animism at the heart of making and in the background of all use of artefacts. To this extent, artefacts are judged, in everyday use as well as the professional design process, by how deep and wide and active their knowledge of human needs and desires is. This paper suggests that given that this animism is inherent to the process and outcomes of design, artefacts can also be judged by whether they promote new knowledge about human needs and desires, though such judgments can only be made on the basis of carefully staged use experiences of the designs

Visualising texts: a design practice approach to humanities data

The availability of archival data coupled with the use of digital tools, alongside a growing awareness of the scholarly potential of visualization (Jessop 2008) has seen an increase in the use of visualization in the humanities. However, these forms of visual representation borrow heavily from the conceptual and visual language of scientific positivism, and subsequently do not reflect many of the core concerns and conditions inherent in humanities research. In this paper we look towards the field of visual communication design as a source of practices that use metaphorical and analogical approaches to text visualization, approaches that may better serve the interpretive nature of humanities research