School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications

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    Editorial [AICCM Bulletin, vol.43 no.2]
    Tse, N (Taylor & Francis, 2022)
    Dialogues around universal ‘best’ practices in conservation are challenging as are demarkations between the East and West, Europe and Asia, and the global north and south. Institutions, networks of care and materials conservation professionals have thereby struggled with ‘a long-standing epistemological debate about the nature of knowledge and expertise between dominant positivist and alternative non-positivist approaches’ (Beebeejaun et al. Citation2013, p. 2). What works in various geographical contexts is poised against an inherent tension between object centred and scientific processes, to those that are value based and socially situated alongside differences in institutional cultures, developmental histories and disciplinary leader’s foci.
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    Editorial [AICCM Bulletin, 41(2)]
    Tse, N (Taylor & Francis, 2020-04-02)
    Papers in this volume focus on geographic locations drawn from Indonesia, Singapore, Taiwan, and the Eastern borders of Australia. In these parts of the world, we all know that there is a long record of active use and conservation of material culture through traditional systems, while the professionalised practice of conservation engendered by its existence, has a relatively recent history.
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    A preliminary investigation into the influence of archaeological material on the yellowing of polyethylene storage bags
    Thompson, K ; Nel, P (Routledge, 2021)
    Concerns around the degradation of plastics have been part of conservation discourse for decades. The spotlight is usually on art and objects, and conservation and display materials, however it could be argued that a significant volume of the plastics in museums is associated with storage bags. This study asked whether the condition of plastic storage bags might be influenced by what is stored inside them. If specific materials can be identified as more likely to affect plastic degradation, museums may have a lead-indicator for efficiently monitoring storage risks. This case study developed a methodology for applying multivariate analysis to collected data to answer this question. A subset of polyethylene self-seal bags used to pack archaeological material from the ‘Casselden Place’ assemblage at Museums Victoria was evaluated. Objective data were combined with subjective assessment of bag degradation features gathered during a collection survey and interrogated using multivariate statistical analysis. Results indicate (1) different levels of yellowing are associated with particular plastic bag stocks and (2) ceramic, slate and tile finds are more likely than other materials to be contained within yellower bags. The research points to future enquiry and demonstrates this methodology shows promise for extension to other large cultural datasets.
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    The Antipodean Legacies of Atlantic Slavery
    Laidlaw, Z (History Teachers' Association of Victoria (HTAV), 2021)
    Compensation awarded to British slave-owners under the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 enabled them to redirect their Atlantic assets and practices to Australia’s burgeoning settler colonies.
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    [Review of the book Empire of Hell: Religion and the Campaign to End Convict Transportation in the British Empire, 1788-1875 by Hilary M. Carey]
    Laidlaw, Z (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
    A book review on: Empire of Hell: Religion and the Campaign to End Convict Transportation in the British Empire, 1788-1875
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    Inquiring into the Corpus of Empire
    Doherty, S ; Ford, L ; Mckenzie, K ; Parkinson, N ; Roberts, D ; Halliday, P ; Laidlaw, Z ; Lester, A ; Stern, P (University of Hawaii Press, 2021-06)
    This article tests the value of corpus linguistics in analyzing nineteenth-century commissions of inquiry into British colonies. It examines and improves the capacity of a computerized text analysis tool called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to identify word meaning, sentiment, and psycholinguistic constructs in nineteenth-century sources. By augmenting its dictionary with nineteenth-century language and cross-checking meaning, we show that the software can code with 97% accuracy. We then demonstrate the tool's potential to explore genres of colonial writing, and to locate emotive language and language relating to power differentials in commission reports, a function we argue may provide a "way in" to assessing how commissioners treated different kinds of British subjects and their testimony in the reports.
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    National biographies and transnational lives: Tracing connections between slavery and settler colonialism
    Laidlaw, Z ; Arnott, G (ANU Press, 2022-05-24)
    The Legacies of British Slave-ownership (LBS) project has helped establish—with unprecedented precision and depth—the ways in which colonial slavery shaped modern Britain. In its original iteration, the project drew on British government records to produce a comprehensive database of the compensation paid to individual slave-owners under the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. That database provided biographical sketches of several thousand of the individuals who—successfully or unsuccessfully—claimed government compensation, as well as listing details of the c. 47,000 compensation awards themselves. Drawing on the LBS database, more recent research (including the contributions to this volume) shows that the influence and legacies of chattel slavery reverberated through Australasia’s colonies of settlement, just as they affected metropolitan Britain and, of course, Africa and the Americas.
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    Roundtable: Linking the legacies of British slave-ownership to Australian colonisation
    Laidlaw, Z ; Hall, C ; McClelland, K ; Martens, J ; Arnott, G (ANU Press, 2022-05-24)
    This is a transcription of a roundtable discussion held on 15 April 2020 between members of the Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery project team.
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    Out of the madhouse: From asylums to caring community?
    Buchanan, RD (WILEY, 2021-07)
    The asylum era has occupied historians of madness for decades, but the story of deinstitutionalization has received comparatively less attention. While this complex process varied from country to country, there were common elements in the way it unfolded across the western world. Historians like to point out that deinstitutionalization was a long time coming, that the demise of the big public madhouses was grounded in their extraordinary expansion in the latter part of the 19th century. Even then, they had come in for scathing criticism suggesting they were inhumane and counterproductive. Public mental hospitals in the United States and some European countries began to empty soon after the Second World War, even before the new drugs arrived in the 1950s, partly driven by labor shortages that encouraged occupational rehabilitation. By then, psychiatrists and allied professionals had embraced the idea of a mental health continuum and shorter-term treatment in community-based services. The economic strains of the 1970s and 80s pushed the process along irreversibly, ensuring that longstanding critiques directly shaped social policy or served as convenient rationales.