World-leading literature database celebrates 25 years

A dynamic literary database managed by The University of Queensland is celebrating 25 years of preserving Australian literature.

AustLit contains digital records of more than one million works and 200,000 authors, managed by a dedicated team at UQ’s St Lucia campus.

Director, Associate Professor Maggie Nolan (pictured), said the milestone anniversary was an opportunity to reflect on AustLit’s evolution and the work that goes into managing a project of its importance and magnitude.

“AustLit offers high quality, curated data that has been evaluated and manually entered by a discipline expert,” Dr Nolan said.

“In an era of AI-generated knowledge and misinformation, it is more important than ever to understand where information comes from.”

AustLit is a unique resource that allows scholars and researchers to conduct complex and comprehensive searches of the Australian literary field and extract interconnecting data, including authors and their works, awards, reviews and scholarly articles.

“Our most significant dataset is BlackWords – a vast dataset of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander storytelling with more than 28,000 work records, that centres First Nations stories at the heart of the Australian literary tradition,” Dr Nolan said.

“We also have research projects and datasets that focus on representations of disability in Australian literature and narratives of climate change.”

To celebrate the 25^th anniversary, AustLit is hosting a series of in-person events and showcasing select projects through an online initiative: 25 for 25 Information Trails.

“The Information Trails are curated and themed collections of works for users to explore that showcase the extent of the information contained within AustLit across different forms and genres including novels, poetry, short stories and scripts,” Dr Nolan said.

“These trails are timed to coincide with significant days across the year and reveal that literature and storytelling are connected to every aspect of Australian life.

"January 26 is one of the most contested days in the nation’s calendar, and the first trail provides links to a range of perspectives on January 26 from the earliest days of the colony until the present time.

“It includes short stories, poems, picture books, and essays, presented in reverse chronological order.”

Dr Nolan said AustLit has played an incredibly important role in Australia’s academic and cultural landscape since its inception in 2001.

“It paints a picture of what Australians have written and read in an incredibly rich, searchable database,” she said.

“AustLit is a resource for all Australians – everyone can engage with it and contribute to the literary record.

“It may be an online database, but it exists because of collaboration.   

“AustLit has only been able to continue to grow for 25 years because of the generous support from UQ and many other universities, the Australian Research Council,  funding bodies such as the Copyright Agency, the auDA Foundation, and the hundreds of researchers, indexers, interns and volunteers who have contributed to AustLit over decades.”