Analysing National Identity Using Digital Methods

This lecture investigates how the digital medium has recently enabled radical changes in the ways that national biography can be generated and engaged with. It takes the position that national biography, whether or not it sets out to do so, reflects how a nation views itself. The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) has been produced continuously for more than 50 years, and has cumulatively generated a story of a nation. The nature of that collective narrative, however, is not easy to discover. Now, as a result of the ADB’s recent adoption of digital formats, the potential for analysis of the biographies it contains has expanded exponentially, offering unprecedented research opportunities for investigating in new ways how the idea of nation itself has evolved in Australia.