Skip to main content
  1. Faculty of Arts
  2. Research
  3. Digital Studio
Faculty of Arts



Digital Studio

The Digital Studio is a collaborative research hub hosted by the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. By building capacity and connections, the Digital Studio aims to humanize and leverage digital technologies to transform the ways in which teaching, research and scholarship shape the social, ethical and cultural dimensions of our world.


HomeProjectsPeopleResourcesNews and EventsDigital Studio LiveContactExhibitions

With a strategic focus on high quality projects in the humanities, arts and social sciences, we provide a range of activities and programs to support researchers and industry partners working with data and digital environments.

  • Digital Chamber Residency

    The Digital Chamber is a space in the Digital Studio housing researchers working on digital humanities and social sciences projects.

  • Digital Studio Fellowships

    The Digital Studio supports international knowledge exchange across the digital humanities, arts and social sciences, by hosting a range of fellows and visiting researchers.

  • Digital Studio Seminar Series

    The Digital Studio hosts a diverse range of semester long seminar series, leading debates and discussion for digital scholars; whether critics, creatives or champions.

  • Digital Studio Graduate Internship Program

    The Digital Studio’s Graduate Internships bring together graduate students, postdocs and academics from across the Faculty of Arts to work together on digital research projects.

Tweets by @digitalstudioUM

The Digital Studio collaborates on digital and data projects with researchers in many diverse fields, provides support and advice on cutting-edge digital methodologies for humanities and social science research, and hosts international speakers, researchers, and interns. The tiles below provide useful guidance to current projects hosted by or in partnership with the Digital Studio.

Current Projects

  • Find and Connect

  • Death Tech Project

  • Who is Nature?

  • CIRCUIT: Mapping Theatre in Australia

  • Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)

  • The Living Archive of Aboriginal Collections

  • Melbourne History Workshop

  • Execution Ballads

  • Australian Women’s Register

  • Australian Cultural Data Engine for Research, Industry and Government

Graduate Internship Projects

Each year the Digital Studio hosts a Graduate Internship program in which Arts researchers have the support of an intern to realise a small component of a digital project. In alignment with our strategy to develop emerging digital and data humanists it provides graduates with training and mentoring in digital methods and data science and allows them to contribute to innovations in project development. The tiles below provide insights into the 2020 projects.

  • Geoparsing and the coverage of South Pacific states in Australian newspapers 2010 - 2020

  • Acts of Resistance: Blackbirding in the South Pacific (1880-1885)

  • Bittersweet: A Cultural History of the Smile

  • Artists on Captain Cook’s Voyages to Batavia

  • Textiles, Trade, and Meaning in the Courts of Northern Italy at the time of Isabella d’Este

  • A Social Network Analysis of Late Twentieth-Century Heritage Conservation

  • Who is Nature? VR visions from Indigenous Latin America and Australia

  • Revisualising Ralph Reid's family history index

  • Doctors Down Under Exhibtion

  • Gender Sensitive International Development in Decentralised Governance Contexts: Women's Collective Action in Rural Indonesia

  • Narrative Now: Creating a podcast series

  • Kulu Language Institute website

  • Otto Rank's Homosexuelle Neigungen [Homosexual Leanings] (critical edition and translation)

  • Revitalising Indigenous-State Relations: Geospatial Map

  • Plain Speech and Death Metaphors in Times of Crisis

  • Founding an Australian Recipe Archive

Want to see more? Click below to take a look at internship projects from previous years.

All graduate internship projects

Want to get involved with the Digital Studio internship program? We welcome applications from research students to undertake the internship, and from academics and external organisations interested in hosting an internship and supervising an intern.

Find out more

Past Projects

  • Living with COVID.info

  • Visualising Venues

  • HASS Data Enhanced Virtual Laboratory (DEVL)

  • Deep Mapping: Creating a Dynamic Web Application Museum "Soft Power" Map

  • Investigating Actual and Perceived Videotext Complexity in Second Language Video Comprehension

  • Visualising Special Music Collections

  • Awaken digital experiences

  • UoM Digital Incubator

  • Theatre and Dance Platform

Digital Studio people

  • Digital Studio Director
  • Digital Studio Project Officer
  • Digital Chamber Researchers
  • Digital Studio Visiting Fellows
  • Digital Studio Steering Committee

Digital Studio Director

Professor David Goodman

Professor David Goodman
Professor David Goodman

Professor David Goodman is Director of the Digital Studio, and a history professor.

Ed., and MA in History at the University of Melbourne, and a PhD in History at the University of Chicago. He taught at the University of Sydney 1986-89 in American and Australian histories, and has taught at the University of Melbourne since 1990, first in Australian studies and then in American history. His 1994 book Gold Seeking - Victoria and California in the 1850s was published by Allen and Unwin and Stanford University Press; his 2011 book Radio's Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s was published by Oxford University Press, New York. His recent publications have been on the history of broadcasting in the United States; he is now completing a study of the local debate about American entry into World War 2.

David Goodman academic profile

Digital Studio Project Officer

Digital Chamber Researchers

  • Thomas Keep

    Tom Keep is a PhD candidate in Archaeology, under the supervision of Dr Gijs Tol and Associate Professor Andrew Jamieson of the University of Melbourne, and external supervisor Dr Rhodora Vennarucci at the University of Arkansas. He is interested in how the value of archaeological research can be most widely, equitably, and engagingly distributed in the digital era. He has previously worked as a research assistant at LithodomosVR under University of Melbourne alumnus Dr Simon Young.

  • Samuel Holleran

    Sam Holleran’s PhD examines public participation in the reimagination of urban burial sites and he is a member of the DeathTech Research Team at the University of Melbourne. He is also an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work examines the power and politics imbued in urban design, and in particular, the use of everyday objects in cities, like street furniture, parks, and signage. He has worked as an art director, researcher, and educator in the field of civically-engaged design with the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) in New York City and the Chair for Architecture and Urban Design at ETH-Zürich. He tweets @sam_holler.

  • Andrew Fuhrmann

    Andrew Fuhrmann is a PhD candidate in the School of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne. He is currently researching the work of Melbourne-based contemporary dance choreographer Lucy Guerin AO. He also has a research interest in performing arts archives and curates the Theatre and Dance Platform with Rachel Fensham, an archival project initiated by the Digital Studio at the University of Melbourne.

  • Rodrigo Gonzalo Encinar

    Rodrigo Gonzalo Encinar is a researcher, visual artist, and designer. His research revolves around analytical explorations of representation, focusing on the latent possibilities of the photographic and moving image archives in the digital age for the study of movement.

    Rodrigo's PhD studies the Beryl De Zoete collection of moving images made in Bali during the 1930s. The project discusses data-as-artifact in an era of disembodiment, where the roles of the ones involved in the production and preservation of knowledge are being challenged. By examining the affordances of motion capture and motion analysis technologies for the study of movement and their application to the documentation of dance, the research redefines the concepts of the authentic and the valuable within the fields of performance, dance, media, and archive studies.

Interested in joining the Digital Chamber community? We welcome applications from researchers, particularly early career researchers, working in fields relating to digital humanities and social sciences.

Find out more

Digital Studio Visiting Fellows

Visiting fellowships

The Digital Studio supports international knowledge exchange across the digital humanities, arts and social sciences, by hosting a range of fellows and visiting researchers.

Are you interested in being hosted by the Studio as a visiting fellow?

For more information please Contact us.

Contact us

Past fellows

Dr Rafael Cabredo
Dr Rafael Cabredo

Dr Rafael Cabredo

The Digital Studio hosted Dr Rafael Cabredo from 19 October to 14 December 2019, in partnership with Graduate House as part of the United Board Fellowship program.

Biography

In a fast-paced information age, leaders need to be agile and adaptive to the changing educational landscape. All decisions and actions should be supported by verified data and be grounded in established values of the institution.

Dr Rafael Cabredo is the Dean of the College of Computer Studies at De La Salle University in the Philippines. Digital humanities is a burgeoning domain for researchers at De La Salle University, with new collaborations established between the College of Computer Studies and the College of Liberal Arts supporting the development of a number of local digital heritage projects – from documenting native dance and local languages, to using natural language processing to analyse historical texts and literature. Dr Cabredo’s research draws on classical music training to blend music theory with computer science techniques, such as discovering how different chord progressions evoke emotional responses in listeners.

Project outline

As an Honorary Fellow in the Digital Studio, Dr Cabredo explored how the digital humanities are delivered at the University of Melbourne, examining models for interdisciplinary practice and collaboration that can help inform research at his home university. He engaged with academics across faculties at Melbourne to share perspectives and approaches that support the continuing development of digital humanities tools and methods in the Philippines.

Dr Liz Stainforth
Dr Liz Stainforth

Dr Liz Stainforth

The Digital Studio hosted Dr Liz Stainforth from June to October 2018, as part of the Australian Endeavour Fellowship Scheme.

Biography

Being based in the Digital Studio was a brilliant experience. Taking part in the Studio’s Digital Heritage Seminar Series, provided invaluable networking opportunities and connected me with other Digital Humanities researchers.

Elizabeth Stainforth completed her doctoral studies in 2016 and has since worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (University of Edinburgh) and as a Lecturer at the University of Leeds. Her research explores digital heritage and memory cultures, and she is currently working on a collaborative book-length project about digital archiving practices (provisional title: All and Each: Dialogues in the Digital Archive). She has been an Associate Editor for parallax journal and published articles in journals including Museum and Society and Digital Humanities Quarterly.

Project outline

Elizabeth’s Endeavour Research Fellowship explored digital heritage culture in Australia, and the ways in which digital cultures inform wider social transformations. The study focused on Trove, a digital heritage aggregator hosted by the National Library of Australia, which provides online access to a range of Australian cultural heritage resources. Trove is one among a number of aggregators, including Europeana, Digital NZ and the Digital Public Library of America, that point towards the reimagining of library and museum spaces online. This development raises important questions about the negotiation of public space, collections preservation and cultural engagement in the digital environment. The project had two distinct but related aims: first, to investigate the development of Trove, alongside comparable initiatives, in order to promote new understandings of their infrastructures; and second, to look at the social context for digital heritage, with an emphasis on the collections of Australian public heritage institutions.

Digital Studio Steering Committee

The Steering Committee meets bi-monthly to oversee the Digital Studio’s strategy and policy

Membership

TBC

Facilities in the Digital Studio

The Digital Studio's spaces are available to be used by Faculty of Arts researchers, staff and partners.

If you haven’t used the Digital Studio spaces before please register first.

Planning a large or a public event? Please email digital-studio@unimelb.edu.au or call 9035 7936 to discuss your requirements.

Would you like help promoting your event? Please email digital-studio@unimelb.edu.au to have your event advertised on our Twitter and website.

Make a booking

Rooms

  • Digital Lab

  • Digital Workshop

  • Collaborative rooms

  • Immersive rooms

  • Exhibition space

  • FAQs – Booking spaces in the Digital Studio

Workshops, training and technology

  • Digital Research in Action

    This series of workshops will introduce Arts researchers to emerging digital research methods, advanced critical thinking and tools for data analysis.

  • Digital Studio Live

    Can't attend a seminar? Watch live online! See upcoming live seminars or watch the videos of past live events.

  • Zeta Book Scanner

  • SCIP Digital Resources
Loading...

Can’t attend a seminar? Watch live online! See upcoming live seminars or watch the videos of past live events.

Upcoming Events

  • Small Data is Beautiful: Analytics, Art and Narrative

    18-19 February 2022. Taking inspiration from the ‘small is beautiful’ mantra of the 1970s which provoked counter-cultural economic and scientific expertise in the name of planetary survival, this symposium invites scholars working on computational methods in the arts, humanities and social sciences to discuss their research with ‘small data’.

Watch past live events

  • Breaking the Social Media Prism: A Talk by Professor Chris Bail, Duke University

    29 September, 2021.In this hour-long talk, Professor Bail discussed his latest book, Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make our Platforms Less Polarizing. Drawing on innovative online experiments and in-depth interviews with social media users from across the political spectrum, this book explains why stepping outside of our echo chambers can make us more polarized, not less.

  • Digital Face-off: The future of news on global technology platforms

    26 May 2021. This panel discussion looked at the implications of the recent mandatory News Media Bargaining Code.

  • Digital Research in Action: Introduction to the Australian Data Archive

    23 April 2021. In this workshop, Dr Steve McEachern offers an “Introduction to the Australian Data Archive”.

  • What is a HASS Data Commons?

    22 April 2021. In this seminar, visiting fellow Dr Steve McEachern presents an overview of two new Australian Research Data Commons projects.

  • “Zooming” In and Out to Examine the “Virus”

    6 Nov 2020. Professor Jodie McVernon and Professor Sean Cubitt

  • “Sharing” and “Gaming” in the Post-pandemic World

    23 October 2020. Dr Nicholas A. John and Professor Saugata Bhaduri

  • “Geeking” and “Prototyping” in the New Normal

    9 Oct 2020. Associate Professor Christina Dunbar-Hester and Professor Fred Turner

  • “Events” in the Post-“Information” Age

    25 September 2020. Associate Professor Julia Sonnevend and Dr Bernard Geoghegan

  • “Internet” and “Hackers”: New Threats and Opportunities

    11 Sept 2020.Professor Gabriella Coleman and Professor Thomas Streeter

  • The Death of the “Analogue” and Re-birth of the “Surrogate”

    28 August 2020. Associate Professor Jeffrey Drouin and Professor Jonathan Sterne

  • Does the Future have a Past? New-Old and Old-New Virtual Realities

    11 March 2020. In this seminar, Professor Peter Otto focuses on three immersive / interactive environments.

  • The weaponisation of fake news in Australia in the digital age

    Wednesday 9 October 2019Associate Professor Andrea Carson, La Trobe University

  • Data and Democracies: Developing Data Capacity in the Victorian Government

    Wednesday 25 September 2019Brad Petry, Head of Data Analytics, Victorian Centre for Data Insights

  • Vote Compass: an exercise in public engagement

    Wednesday 18 September 2019Aaron Martin, Co-director of The Policy Lab

  • The Possibility of Citizen Intelligence

    Wednesday 4 September 2019 Richard de Rozario, The SWARM Project, University of Melbourne

  • Digital technology and organisational fluidity in British politics

    Wednesday 21 August 2019 Dr Anthony Ridge-Newman, Liverpool Hope University

  • The Indigenous Data Network: Restoring Community Control over an Intangible Asset

    Wednesday 29 May 2019Dr James Rose, University of Melbourne

  • IndigenousX as a Form of Digital Disruption

    Wednesday 1 May 2019Luke Pearson, Founder and CEO of IndigenousX

  • Digital Environments: Communication in Immersive Media

    Wednesday 18 April 2019 Pauric Freeman Maynooth University, Ireland

  • Immersive Culture: Sharing Traditional Knowledge with ‘Torres Strait Virtual Reality’

    Wednesday 3 April 2019Rhett Loban, Macquarie University

  • Digital Studio Seminar: Recoding relationality

    Wednesday 5 December 2018 David Gaertner

  • Digital Heritage Workshop

    Wednesday 17 October 2018 Panel discussions asking: what is required for a career in digital heritage now and into the future?

  • Digital environments of Indigenous song

    Wednesday 3 October 2018 Dr Sally Treloyn Faculty of Fine Arts and Music

  • Re-photography as a tool for citizen heritage

    Wednesday 19 September 2018 Professor Hannah Lewi Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning

  • Creating a short film digital archive

    Wednesday 5 September 2018 Donna Hensler Victorian College of the Arts

  • Digital Studio Seminar: Artificial arts

    Wednesday 3 September 2018 Chris Rodley

Stream not working? The Digital Studio streams some of our events through YouTube. If you are using an adblocker you may not be able to view the stream as some blockers consider embedded videos to be ads. If no stream appears, you can try disabling your adblocker or changing your pop-up settings in your browser.

Contact the Digital Studio

Email: digital-studio@unimelb.edu.au
Phone: +61 3 9035 7936
Twitter: @digitalstudioUM

Office hours at the Information Hub (Room 3.10)

Wednesdays and Thursdays 1-4 pm

Applications and Forms

Want to host or participate in a Digital Studio Graduate Internship?

Digital Studio Graduate Internships

Want to work in the Digital Chamber?

Digital Chamber Residencies

Want to undertake a research fellowship at the Digital Studio?

Digital Studio Fellowships

Want to a book a space for digital humanities or social sciences research, teaching, or events?

Booking Digital Studio Spaces

Want help promoting your public event in digital humanities or social sciences?

Digital Studio Event Promotion

Location

The Digital Studio is located on the 2nd and 3rd floor, West Wing of the Arts West (Building 148). Access is from Level 2 of the North Wing of Arts West, during 9.00am - 5.00pm, or via the lifts/stairs in the rear foyer of the Arts West ground floor.

Exhibtions