AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource

AustLit http://www.austlit.edu.au/ is an internet-based collaboration between researchers and librarians from Australian universities designed to comprehensively record the history of Australian literary and story making cultures. AustLit is an encyclopaedia of Australian writers and writing.

History

AustLit was founded in 2000 as a resource and research infrastructure for literary studies. It has been funded by participating universities and the Australian Research Council

Australian Research Council

The Australian Research Council is the Australian Government’s main agency for allocating research funding to academics and researchers in Australian universities. Its mission is to advance Australia’s capacity to undertake research that brings economic, social and cultural benefit to the...

. The University of Queensland leads the consortium. Partner universities include the University of New South Wales

University of New South Wales

The University of New South Wales , is a research-focused university based in Kensington, a suburb in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia...

, the University of Sydney

University of Sydney

The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...

, Flinders University

Flinders University

Flinders University, , is a public university in Adelaide, South Australia. Founded in 1966, it was named in honour of navigator Matthew Flinders, who explored and surveyed the South Australian coastline in the early 19th century.The university has established a reputation as a leading research...

, the University of Wollongong

University of Wollongong

The University of Wollongong is a public university located in the coastal city of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia, approximately 80 kilometres south of Sydney...

, James Cook University

James Cook University

James Cook University is a public university based in Townsville, Queensland, Australia. The university has two Australian campuses, located in Townsville and Cairns respectively, and an international campus in Singapore. JCU is the second oldest university in Queensland—proclaimed in 1970—and the...

 and the University of Western Australia

University of Western Australia

The University of Western Australia was established by an Act of the Western Australian Parliament in February 1911, and began teaching students for the first time in 1913. It is the oldest university in the state of Western Australia and the only university in the state to be a member of the...

. Significant levels of research and teaching in the field are undertaken at all partner universities.

AustLit and Research

AustLit publishes biographical entries and brief essays on Australian writers, critics and storytellers, organisational histories relating to publishers, theatre companies and other arts organisations, and complete bibliographical histories of works of fiction and criticism. It also has an active digitisation program to generate full text versions of out-of-print literary works and critical articles about Australian literature.

AustLit Research Communities http://www.austlit.edu.au/specialistDatasets support detailed explorations of particular aspects of Australia's literary culture. Researchers can work within AustLit to create datasets around a specific field. These projects range across book, magazine and publishing histories, subject specific surveys of regionally-based publishing and thematically-based subsets. Research into the history of Australian popular and pulp fiction is supported alongside research into theatre history, drama and multicultural writers. BlackWords http://www.austlit.edu.au/BlackWords is a landmark AustLit research project that details the lives and work of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and storytellers.

AustLit has become a key information resource for the study of Australian literature and related fields. Because of its status as the most comprehensive record of a nation's publishing history, AustLit has become an important source of data for analysing Australian literary history. With the rise of Digital Humanities research practice in Australia AustLit demonstrates some of the ways that research can be undertaken with large quantities of rich data.