Digital Studio

Dr Tyne Daile Sumner is a researcher and consultant with expertise in digital skills training, community engagement, and Digital Humanities. Her research examines the intersection between Literature, surveillance and big data. Her monograph, Lyric Eye: The Poetics of Twentieth-Century Surveillance, will be published with Routledge in 2020. Tyne is currently the Strategic Advocacy and Engagement Lead for Digital & Data in Chancellery, where she is working on a range of projects relating to the use of emerging technologies in space and place, digital innovation and digital skills capability building. She also oversees a range of projects and initiatives in the Digital Humanities at the University of Melbourne and nationally. On twitter she is @tynedaile.

Mia an early career oral historian, with a research focus on transnational histories and memories of war and conflict, trauma, and reconciliation. She completed her PhD in History at the University of Melbourne in 2018, where she teaches American and Southeast Asian history. Mia’s doctoral research was an oral history with Australian and American Vietnam veterans who returned to Việt Nam after the War. She has published on veteran memories and war narratives in The Australian Journal of Politics and History and written on contemporary issues surrounding veterans’ returns to Vietnam for The Conversation.

Lynne is currently working as research assistant on the ARC Linkage project “Creative Convergence: Enhancing Impact in Regional Theatre for Young People” (2015-2018). Her research engages in interdisciplinary dialogue across the fields of new materialism, digital media, theatre and performance. She has a recent publication in the Journal of Science and Popular Culture and is currently writing a chapter for book Routledge publication, Western Theatre in Global Contexts. Non-traditional research outputs include a series of audio podcast interviews with leading Australian puppeteers on the use of new technologies and materiality. Lynne sits on the advisory board as the Australasian representative of the International Research Commission for Puppet Theatre and regularly teaches on the use of objects and images in performance practice.

Hannah Gould is a socio-cultural anthropologist and research fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She works on questions of discarding and disconnection, religion, and material culture, through interconnected research projects on ‘the stuff of death’ and ‘the death of stuff’. Her doctoral research, for which she received the Japan Foundation Fellowship, investigated the Japanese funeral industry, showing how cultural traditions around death can themselves ‘die’, be replaced, or transformed. Hannah’s ethnography of the production, consumption, and disposal of domestic Buddhist altars reveals how people creatively use material objects to forge intimate relationships with the dead. She is a member of the DeathTech Research Team at the University of Melbourne.

Nell is an inter-disciplinary scholar and collections specialist with multi-faceted experience in cross-cultural environments and public institutions. She holds degrees in Politics and Art Curatorship, as well as graduate qualifications in Applied Anthropology and Law. Nell has held professional appointments at a variety of institutions in Australia and abroad including Museums Victoria, Berndt Museum of Anthropology, National Gallery of Victoria and Museum Productions (NYC). Her doctoral project, entitled Cross-Cultural Encounters: Pacific Exhibitions and the Making of Meanings, explores the form and function of Pacific exhibitions in Australia, with a particular focus on visitor experience and impact.

Fraser Allison is a research fellow in the Interaction Design Lab at the University of Melbourne. He is primarily a human-computer interaction researcher, with a focus on natural user interfaces, complex user experiences and the ways in which people draw meaning from technologically mediated leisure activities. His doctoral research concerns the design and usage of voice-operated video games. Fraser is also an experienced market research consultant, with nearly a decade of experience working on projects for some of Australia’s best-known brands to understand the drivers of consumer behaviour in industries including tourism, travel, leisure, healthcare, retirement living, animal welfare, telecommunications, retail, superannuation and banking. He is a member of the DeathTech Research Team at the University of Melbourne.

Holleran’s PhD examines public participation in the reimagination of urban burial sites. He is also an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work examines the power and politics imbued in urban design. In particular, he is interested in 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 is a member of the DeathTech Research Team at the University of Melbourne.

Tom is a PhD candidate in the archaeology department, under the supervision of Dr Gijs Tol and Associate Professor Andrew Jamieson of the University of Melbourne, and the external supervision Dr Rhodora Vennarucci of the University of Arkansas. He holds honours degrees in both psychology and archaeology, and 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.

Reuben Brown is an ethnomusicologist with expertise in Indigenous Australian performance traditions from northern Australia, and digital environments for accessing, locating, and recirculating archival recordings of song and related metadata. For his PhD research based at PARADISEC, Reuben returned archival recordings of song from the 1948 American Australian Expedition to Arnhem Land to communities in the Northern Territory. He collaborated with ceremony leaders of manyardi in western Arnhem Land to document and analyse these recordings as part of a living and multilingual song tradition performed at funerals, diplomacy ceremonies, festivals and public celebrations. His current research involves collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of linguists, musicologists, historians, archivists and song specialists in the Pilbara and western Arnhem land, building online and offline platforms for accessing archival song recordings linked to community-enriched metadata. Reuben enjoys research affiliations with the Research Unit for Indigenous Language (RUIL), Research Unit for Indigenous Arts and Cultures (RUIAC), and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL).