1950s Australia saw a period of economic growth and revival, marking a notable departure from the difficulties wrought by the Great Depression and World War II. Over this time, Australia’s cultural landscape flourished, marking the beginning of an arts renaissance that would sweep the nation as it continued through the second half of the century. Much of this growth can be attributed to the film industry, which saw a notable upturn as everyday Australians settled into a post-war lifestyle (Steven, 2016). Both film screenings and festivals proved to be the perfect medium for modern cultural exchange, bringing together filmmakers, artists, and audiences from a range of diverse backgrounds thus facilitating the intermingling of ideas, perspectives and artistic expression (Wong, 2011). My project looks to locate these post-war film festivals, assessing both their influence on the development of historical cultural hubs, alongside their effect on the cultural identity of modern Australia.
Background
My project collates the locations of Australian film festivals and screenings between 1950 and 1955, with the goal of uncovering potential trends between their placements and modern-day cultural hubs. The project visualises this data through an interactive map, in hopes that by doing so, the information will be easily accessible and legible to everyday Australians – providing viewers with a unique insight into the nation’s cultural development.
However, the aggregation and visualisation of Australian cultural data isn’t something unique to this project. There are several organisations that have looked to map Australian cultural data for a variety of reasons.
One such project comes in the form of the Australian Cultural Data Engine, a multidisciplinary project led by the University of Melbourne. Specifically, the ‘Cultural Hotspots and Local Scenes’ sector of this project acts very similarly to my own (granted on a much larger scale), looking to map small-scale clusters of Australian cultural activity. The organisation suggests that by mapping these cultural hotspots, they will be able to provide a unique insight into the social, political, and artistic values of various Australian cities, suburbs and regions (Fensham, 2023).
Similarly, other projects such as Mukurtu (WSU, 2023) and the CSRP (FORM, 2013) also map cultural data and, though they revolve around different topics, share a common goal: aggregating historical data to better enable individuals to understand themselves, their society and their cultural context.
Data
The data within this project has been compiled from Troves’ Newspaper and Gazettes’ Archive – an archive featuring over 24 million digitised Australian newspaper articles (Trove, 2023). Making use of the Trove API, I have collated articles relating to post-war Australian film festivals, storing both the metadata provided by Trove (including the article contents, link, date and newspaper source) and the respective regions each event was held at (with their latitude and longitude coordinates, as provided by Google Maps’ Geocoding API). To do so, I have chosen to use a simple spreadsheet for a variety of reasons. Not only does it lend itself nicely to structured data and user editing, however to it also supports the importing and exporting of CSV files. Were the project to be automated with a larger dataset, an SQL database may be more appropriate.
Methodology
I began by browsing relevant articles on film, and making note of common, recurring keywords. Terms such as ‘Screening’, ‘Premiere’ and ‘Festival’ allowed me to reduce the bulk of the search results, omitting film reviews and local theatre timetables. Similarly, I also excluded a large set of overseas place names, such as ‘Venice’ and ‘Cannes’. By doing so I was able to ensure the results were local to Australia, but subsequently omitted articles discussing films from these regions entirely. Were I to undertake the project again, I’d like to discover a way to retain these results. Between 1950 and 1955, this query produced 2,496 total results, which were then manually sorted to produce the 141 articles present in my dataset. A search without any keyword restrictions produced 13,118 results.
However, this information was still far from perfect. After downloading the queried data (via the Trove-Harvester tool (Sherratt, 2023)), I manually sorted the articles, cross-checking the ‘relevance score’ provided by Trove with the article titles and their contents. Whilst doing so, I also extracted relevant placenames, compiling them into a column of their own and generating their lat/long coordinates. Finally, the data was exported to a CSV, uploaded to uMap and styled appropriately.
Discussion
The final product can be found here, with the map containing each of the articles I collected, alongside pins in their relevant locations. Unfortunately, my results don’t highlight anything exceptionally unordinary – however, there are still some notable trends and patterns.
Firstly, the project reinforces our existing understanding of modern cultural hubs. With over half of the entries being located in capital cities, the results confirm that not only were cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra culturally rich historically, but that post-war film has uniquely contributed to their development as bustling contemporary cultural hubs.
Similarly, the findings also underscore the influence the arts have had on the evolution of regional areas. Regions such as Ipswich and Olinda are known for being extremely culturally rich nowadays, with my project only confirming this. These towns in particular see significantly more entities than other regional towns, suggesting that film screenings and the arts have played an integral role in establishing their current status.
More importantly, however, lies in the project’s ability to highlight the importance of cultural data. Much akin to the works of the ACDE, these results do a fantastic job of showcasing how historical data can provide us with a unique insight into Australia’s modern-day cultural landscape. Moreover, by doing so, the project is able to emphasise the distinct connection between post-war film and culture, providing a fantastic lens through which this link can be explored more closely.
Evaluation
Overall, I believe my project was partially successful. Though the dataset is quite small the project does well in laying the relevant groundwork to address the question at hand, with many of its shortcomings simply due to its size and scope, rather than issues with the project development. Evidently, by implementing a larger dataset, further automating the aggregation process or employing multiple visualisation methods, the research may have been enhanced (Drucker, 2021), resulting in a more conclusive outcome.
Nevertheless, my project’s efforts were not in vain. The project served as a valuable introduction to the field of digital humanities research, equipping me with a variety of useful research skills. Between data aggregation and analysis tools, the foundations of iterative research and the ability to analyse the works of others (Rockwell, 2012), this project has provided me with an exceptional introductory skillset. While it may not have provided an exhaustive exploration of Australian culture, the acquired skills will allow me to tackle this question, or even more complex ones, more effectively in the future.
Conclusion
It’s clear that there is not only a notable connection between contemporary Australian culture and historical cultural hubs, but that film festivals have played a sizeable role in their development. Though the project itself is not large enough to draw a definitive conclusion, it’s evident that cultural mapping and data aggregation play an important part in allowing us to understand our national identity. Overall this project has not only highlighted the cultural influence of film festivals but has provided a unique stepping stone for deeper exploration into Australia’s dynamic cultural identity.
Bibliography
Drucker, J., 2021. The Digital Humanities Coursebook: An Introduction to Digital Methods for Research and Scholarship. 1st ed. Routledge, pp.1-7
Fensham, R., 2023. Cultural Hotspots and Local Scenes. [online] ACD Engine. Available at: https://www.acd-engine.org/case-studies/cultural-hotspots-and-local-scenes/
FORM, 2013. Canning Route Stock Project – One Road. [online] Canning Stock Route Project. Available at: https://www.canningstockrouteproject.com/digital-futures/one-road/
Trove, 2023. Newspapers and Gazettes Category. [online] National Library of Australia. Available at: https://trove.nla.gov.au/help/categories/newspapers-and-gazettes-category
Rockwell, G., 2012. Short Guide to Evaluation of Digital Work. Journal of Digital Humanities, 1(4).
Sherratt, T., 2023. GLAM-Workbench/trove-newspaper-harvester (version v2.0.0). Zenodo.
Stevens, K., 2016. Australian film festivals: Audience, place, and exhibition culture. Springer. pp.17-25
Washington State University, 2023. About Mukurtu. [online] Mukurtu.org. Available at: https://mukurtu.org/get-mukurtu/
Wong, C.H.Y., 2011. Film festivals: Culture, people, and power on the global screen. Rutgers University Press, pp. 1-5
My Mapped Data
