Digitisation secures research data

Volume 7 Number 4 April 11 - May 8 2011

Work is under way at the University Of Melbourne to document valuable research data to enable re-use. By Katherine Smith.

Reading entries in official registers of convicts who formed the founding population of post-contact Tasmania is strangely addictive.

Apply a little imagination and vivid images spring to mind of these men and women from nearly 200 years ago who survived their convict experience and participated in the establishment of a new society in an alien land about which they knew almost nothing.

The earliest records, from around the 1820s, document the experience of most convicts through a very short entry only: name, offence, the date and term of sentence and the name of the ship in which they were transported. As the convict population grew and management became more complex, the records become more detailed. Those with short records were the compliant and industrious.

Those with lengthier entries lived more problematic lives, with their repeated drunken and disorderly conduct, impudent language, further criminal activity or absence without leave noted down alongside details of their punishments. These ranged in severity from a fine of a few shillings to several days confined in a cell on bread and water, to terrible floggings, or, in the case of the women, having their hair cut off or shaved. One pitiful account tells of a young woman absent without leave from her assigned place of work who, once recaptured, was confined to a cell but not punished further, as she had been already “well beaten by her master”.

As important but fragile historical documents these hefty books are not readily accessible but they are now available on the websites of the Founders and Survivors Project website and the Archives of Tasmania, carefully digitised so that even the texture of the paper can be made out, and the complex handwriting and unfamiliar abbreviations magnified for ease of interpretation.

The Founders and Survivors Project began as a multi-university project funded by the Australian Research Council, with the School of Population Health at the University of Melbourne as a leading partner along with the University of Tasmania. It is a collaboration between historians, genealogists, sociologists and epidemiologists which seeks to understand the physical and psychological features of the 73,000 men, women and children who formed the earliest non-Indigenous population of Tasmania. They are hoping it can reveal something of the physiological and psycho-social makeup of contemporary Australian society.

The digitisation – including covers of the tattered, two century-old ledgers in which the convict information was recorded – was initiated by the Founders and Survivors project, using technology from Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre, and completed by the Archives Office of Tasmania. The linkage of record transcriptions amounting to a million lines of data collected by the University of Tasmania – to the image of each convict’s various records, has been a task of advanced data management by the Melbourne University’s Sandra Silcot and Claudine Chionh.

Now the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) is funding the translation of that massive dataset into a form that can be archived and used by researchers in perpetuity.

Federally funded by the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, ANDS is identifying research data collections of national significance so that they can be better utilised, according to the University of Melbourne’s Owen O’Neill.

http://www.library.unimelb.edu.au/