Hart Cohen

Still a burning issue: measuring screen production research

ABSTRACT Valuing the production of screen works as research in the academy has become an urgent matter of research and scholarly equity facing the Australian screen production sector. Made up of filmmaker-academics this sector is collectively speaking out about a number of burning issues as evidenced in this article which deeply affect the kinds of scholarship and research enabled in the tertiary space. Representing the collective voices of a significant sample of Australian filmmaker-academics, this article offers some shared perspectives on the assessment of screen works by tertiary institutions created through creative practice research. Understanding what is occurring in the sector includes a deeper examination of three issues. The first issue arises from the Australian federal government metrics, used to classify research products such as films and screen works, called Excellence in Research for Australia and the Higher Education Research Data Collection. These two productivity metrics are disconnected when assessing films and screen works. The second issue is the development of criteria for valuing film and screen works as research, and the third issue relates to filmmaker-academic workload, as assessed by Australian institutions. When combined these issues present screen production academics with an overarching question – how are the production of screen works assessed and measured in and by tertiary institutions?

Film as Cultural Memory: The Struggle for Repatriation and Restitution of Cultural Property in Central Australia

My contribution to this volume reflects on how the Strehlow filmworks – the ethnographic films made by TGH Strehlow in the middle of the 20th century – intersect with the idea of repatriation. The aim is to invoke a number of questions that relate to the recovery of cultural memory and the maintenance of cultural heritage through film. At the heart of this inquiry are questions about the provenance and process of collection of the cultural materials now held by the Strehlow Research Centre (SRC). There has been, for many years up to the present, an implied concern with how repatriation would be enacted with the collection. The process has undergone a major shift by the introduction of digital technologies as a means of effecting digital repatriation and in this fashion overcoming some of the barriers that have historically been said to exist in repatriating physical objects from collecting institutions.

Database Narratives: Conceptualising Digital Heritage Databases in Remote Aboriginal Communities

Interactive web-based resources are significant to the mediation of culture in that they act as an interface (Newton: 2003) between communities and information structures. The focus of this paper is on the use of digital media arts and user-centered technologies to develop a digital heritage resource to revitalize a community’s cultural capital. The paper addresses the creation and use of an interactive database that forms the portal to a digital repository of archival media. The database supports and extends an Australian classic memoir, Journey to Horseshoe Bend by TGH Strehlow. Journey to Horseshoe Bend is a vivid ethno-historiographic account of the Aboriginal (Arrernte/Arrarnta), settler and Lutheran communities of Central Australia in the 1920’s. The Journey to Horseshoe Bend database draws on a broad range of visual representations (including images, maps, concept diagrams, text and other media resources), and through hyperlinks connects these media to specific annotated points in an electronic version of the book. The paper focuses on the book’s use as a digital heritage resource and explores the link between information architectures and knowledge practices in particular contexts to address the following question: How can a digital heritage resource be conceived as a sustainable emerging “thing-in-the-making” to reflect community, cultural and knowledge interests? Background resources: http://bugs.commarts.uws.edu.au/cocoon/jhsb/item/69994/ and project website: http://www.commarts.uws.edu.au/jthb/