Projects

Current funded projects

Curating an online historical map of Melbourne: examining the expansion of road infrastructures from 1966 to 2025

David Taniar, Kiki Adhinugraha, Eric Pardede

Population growth in Melbourne demands the development of new dwellings and infrastructures. The development requires significant planning, and the historical geospatial data such as maps can be used as an important factor for decision making. One fundamental element of maps is roads, which are represented as complex networks. While online maps like Google Maps accurately depict current geospatial features, they do not show how Melbourne’s roads looked decades ago. Understanding the evolution of road infrastructure is pivotal for studying urban growth.

This project aims to curate a historical map of greater Melbourne, showing its yearly road development from 1966 to 2025. This map will serve as a foundational resource for analysing urban development and assisting policy makers for infrastructure strategic planning. This project demonstrates data curation and librarianship within the geospatial domain, highlighting the importance of preserving historical geospatial information for future research and planning.

IDSLA: Indigenous Data Sovereignty & Living Archives on Country

Susan McKemmish, Gillian Oliver, Kirsten Thorpe, Shannon Faulkhead, Narissa Timberry

The project aims to:

  • Design Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Data Governance: Frameworks, models, protocols in context of Voice, Treaty and Truth Telling
  • Undertake participatory research with community/ies who are engaged with Resource Centres, Keeping Places etc on Country to co-design:
    • Repatriation frameworks, models and protocols
  • Co-design knowledge management and information systems to support Living Archives and Repatriation – in new sovereignty/rights-based paradigm, combined with sophisticated meta-data - flexible, distributed, searchable, secure, differentiated access.

Implementation of the planned frameworks, models and protocols will transform Indigenous recordkeeping and archiving, enabling Indigenous ownership, self determination and sovereignty over data, records and archives in all forms created by or about Indigenous peoples and communities.

Participatory Digital Archiving Of Balinese Temples

Kadek Satriadi, Bernie Jenny, Joshua Seguin, Viviane Hessami, Tom Chandler, Made Windu Antara Kesiman, I Gede Mahendra Darmawiguna & Putu Hendra Saputra

Bali, an island with a rich cultural heritage, faces threats to its culture from over-tourism, natural disasters, and inadequate archiving of its cultural heritage. This project, part of the Bali Digital Heritage Initiative, aims to preserve Balinese culture using innovative technology for social good. The proposed project will pilot a participatory archiving platform to digitise thousands of vulnerable Balinese temples using accessible, state-of-the-art digital capture software on mobile phones. The platform will enable the Balinese population to create high-quality digital records of temples and preserve these records for future generations as architectural, cultural, historical and heritage archives. This pilot project will

  1. engage and educate local stakeholders and
  2. test the participatory framework and infrastructure.

The expected outcome of this pilot project is an understanding of the expectations of Balinese stakeholders regarding the participatory platform and an understanding of the feasibility of the technological implementation.