5
April 2000
Milkbar.com.au:
Understanding Globalisation in a Local Community in Australia
Summary
of Project:
This
PhD project is concerned with the most effective means of
communicating and understanding ‘globalisation’ discourse
through the numerous tools available to the intellectual researcher.
I am doing a PhD about globalisation that uses technology
in an appropriate way academically and will broaden the distribution
and discursive power of academic social-history discourse.
The findings of this research should result in the greater
understanding of the process and definition of globalisation
for inner-city Australian communities. Whilst a great number
of textual sources will be used in this study, this is not
what Manuel Castell terms ‘a book about books’. It is a study
about globalisation using established sociological and historical
methodology. It will be augmented by the new technologies
offered by on-line interactive multimedia and not essentially
'remediated' by them. Thus, this work will express its findings
evenly between the bound codex and on-line media. New-media
developments, as has often been the case in the past with,
for instance, television and radio, can be understood as lateral
developments. New media can offer the intellectual researcher
much more scope to include valuable visual and aural materials
in their work that can then be arranged in innovative analytical
structures. This work will seek to explore what these developments
offer to ‘traditional’ research by doing a pertinent humanities
research task.
Brief
Description:
This
work will rely upon the work of theorists such as Daniel Bell
and Manuel Castell, and the other numerous valuable sources
available here including RMIT’s own John Wiseman's. [1] .
It intends to be much more empirically-grounded study that
utilises some of the contested principals of globalisation
and applies them to the geographical region of Fitzroy/Abbotsford/Collingwood.
Some of the principals on globalisation include the post-industrialisation
of the major Western economies (and the rise of the new-middle
class), the demise of the industrial working class, the proliferation
of information technologies and communication, and the extraordinary
expansion of global finance with the networking of the global
economy (Castell’s terms this the Network Society). There
are likewise questions of immigration and ethnicity and the
examination of industries, classes and geographical regions
that are not part of any ‘global node’. My work will ground
the larger analytical structures of the theorists in local
evidence to help prove if these are legitimate ways of defining
globalisation.
This
project has as a major component, a web based work and cannot
simply rely on the book-based bibliographic cannon on globalisation.
I will thus seek photographic materials, digital video recordings,
and other material to include in the web structure. Some of
these will be archival and some constructed through personal
interviews. I will duly acknowledge borrowed concepts and
tools when used in my analysis and look at converging evidence
and trends from several sources, a methodology well established
among Historians. A broad scope is required in this study
because of the nature of the subject. The aim is to discover
the meaning of globalisation in a small inner-city community
in Australia using the tools at my disposal which now includes
interactive multimedia.
My
project will contribute to an understanding of globalisation
by applying the key frameworks of globalisation to inner city
Melbourne then illuminating these through analysing photographic
evidence (particularly the Abbottsford foundry, CUB and Brunswick
St) and through personal digital video interviews with owners
of local icons such as milkbars. The images, interviews, and
sounds will help to build a history of globalisation rooted
in the local.
The
local is often positioned as the opposite to globalisation
and using it to approach larger cultural shifts is already
well established in Australian intellectual culture through
individuals such as Meaghan Morris in her seminal work The
Pirate's Fiancé (1988) and the more recent Too
Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture (1998). A multimedia
presentation of the process and definition of globalisation
can greatly enhance our understanding of this tremendously
important debate through broadening its intellectual distribution
beyond the academic codex.
The
particular questions I hope to address in this study include:
1.
How will the particular presentation of this project (thesis
and web) enhance our understanding of new-media historical
practice with its inherent historiographical ramifications?
(a)
How can multimedia help us to understand globalisation through
the academic presentation of knowledge?
(b)
How effective are the navigational techniques and analytical
frameworks in conveying and augmenting established historical
techniques? What relationships are forged between thesis and
multimedia when presenting a PhD in this fashion?
(c)
What are the discourses surrounding the term "globalisation"
and how is it defined in the local Australian context?
2. What can a qualitative local history of
a selected number of sites within a small Australian community,
tell us about globalisation in the Australian context.
Location
and Resources:
This
project is located in the School of Creative Media and will
utilise the research and production facilities in the Centre
for Animation and Interactive Media (AIM) as well as the RMIT
annex at Cinemedia. The geographical focus of the study will
be Fitzroy, Collingwood and Abbottsford and will draw upon
resources and evidence from broader Australian government
records such as the National Archives, Canberra, State Library
of Victoria, the Mitchell library, State archives, and Yarra
City Council records. Specific industry archives, such as
Carlton and United Breweries and the Abbottsford foundry may
also be used. There are also extensive collections held in
private hands. International resources and evidence will be
drawn upon from appropriate international bodies to aid in
the establishment of context and trends.
I
plan to study next year for a period of time at the University
of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities
(IATH) in the Virginia Centre for Digital History <http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu>
and have secured a fellowship that commences in September
2000. This centre is the leading department of its type in
the United States and has built a reputation for excellence
through innovations such as Postmodern Culture, the world’s
first fully refereed e-journal. (RMIT library subscribes to
Postmodern Culture <http://muse.jhup.edu>.The Institute
for Advanced Technology in the Humanities employees both Professor
Jerome McGann, a world-respected scholar on the evolution
of scholarly editing principles for the web, and Professor
Edward Ayres. Ed Ayres' project The Valley of the Shadow:
Living the Civil War in Pennsylvania and Virginia , which
was one of the first serious internationally recognised attempts
at web-based history. <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2/>
Another
institution that I will contact during this study is George
Mason University’s Centre for History and New Media <http://web.gmu.edu.chnm>
Presently this is the only history department that I know
whose sole focus is upon the application of new-media to history
making.
Rationale
for the Program:
The
frameworks used to analyse the geographical region of my study
will be borrowed from one of the seminal theorists of globalisation,
Arjun Appadurai. Appadurai's five cultural flows will be adapted
and utilised as chapter outlines and narrative paths within
the on-line interactive. The frameworks include. (1) Ethnoscapes,
produced by the flows of people, tourists, immigrants, refugees,
exiles, and guest workers. (2) Technoscapes, which is the
machinery and plant flows produced by multinational and national
corporations and government agencies. (3) Financescapes, produced
by the rapid flows of money in the currency markets and stock
exchanges. (4) Mediascapes, the repertoires of images and
information, the flows that are produced and distributed by
newspapers, magazines, television, and film. (5) Ideoscapes,
linked to flows of images, which are, associated with state
or counter-state movement ideologies, which are comprised
of the Western enlightenment, images of democracy, freedom,
and welfare rights. Depending on the direction of the research
the last two frameworks may be collapsed into one, as they
are increasingly becoming similar. At this stage I have not
refined Appadurai’s categories not developed the alternative
application. This categorisation will develop over the course
of the study. [2]
3.4
Methods:
As
with any form of academic inquiry, one must forge a tenuous
balance between, the big questions being addressed and a more
specific focus. At this stage, I prefer a qualitative approach
and will concentrate on milkbars, factories, cafés,
housing commission flats, pubs, IT business’, media, retail,
drug dealing, political organisations, advertising and protest
within my geographical region. The broader hermeneutic device
of globalisation will then be used to analyse these ‘sites’.
Fitzroy has an active historical society with Historians such
as Tony Birch and Janet McCalman who have undertaken much
work in the area. It is Melbourne's first suburb and has witnessed
dramatic shifts in recent years that reflect some of the extremes
in our society. Abbottsford and Collingwood are seminal post-industrial
suburbs and have an enormous visual legacy of Australia’s
declining industrial working class.
I
will seek primary evidence that may take the form of archival
or family records and secondary material of previous research
within the area. The primary material (where appropriate)
will be digitised and placed on the web and will in itself
form a valuable historical record of local milkbars and other
institutions in the context of global change before it becomes
unavailable, destroyed or lost. The work of the Historians,
archivists, and librarians working in the field of digital
preservation will be invaluable here.
The
primary evidence and digital-video footage gathered will be
used to construct an on-line interactive. Historians are storytellers
and by creating an interactive Web based historical-documentary,
the story of globalisation will be told that alludes to other
stories and evidence beneath the surface. The user will be
able to interrogate this work, check how the sources can be
linked, make their own links and narrative diversions and
make new relationships that may reveal new stories. In this
way, the audience is not led to believe that there is a simple
linear method to advancing historical knowledge.
Many
of the current debates within the history and computing field
concern issues such as the historiographical effects of interactive
and non-linear narratives and the use of the standards SGML
and XML in the preservation of ephemeral media. My particular
contribution to this field is the successful explication of
a social history question in an on-line new media environment
that retains much of the integrity of humanistic thought and
finds a workable balance between content and process without
obviating the former for the later. [3]
I
have the encouragement of a number of Historians working within
the field of history and computing. Associate Professor Paul
Turnbull of ANU's Centre for Cross-Cultural Research <http://coombs.anu.edu.au/~cookproj>
has offered assistance and peer review.
In
terms of resources, I do not envisage that this web project
will be an expensive or technically inaccessible endeavour
beyond generally available computing products (like software,
mini digital video, scanners, and video editing equipment).
AIM already has this equipment. There will be numerous travel,
production, and photographic expenses that may be covered
by seeking external funding from funds such as the Federation
Fund or the Cinemedia/ABC accord. For production support,
I have the AIM centre and John Power who has had many years
experience in digital video, web design, treatments and art
directing.
Bibliography
