Bücher veröffentlicht von Grattan Street Press, University of Melbourne

Small Data is Beautiful investigates the conceptual, artistic, and computational qualities of small data. This original collection presents a challenge to discussions centred on big data - algorithms, surveillance and the datafication of human lives - by exploring the seditious and revelatory potential of radically rethinking data in creative research and practice. Taking inspiration from the 'small is beautiful' mantra of the 1970s, a counter-cultural pursuit of planetary survival, the book interrogates the scale of the digital age through narratives, intimacies, representations, and ecologies. It offers a rich interdisciplinary dialogue from perspectives including cultural history, sociology, visual art, performance studies, archaeology, musicology, literary studies, and data science. On the cover of this collection is an image that is both ordinary and remarkable, depending on where you place your focus. To the naked eye and from a distance, these striking jewel-like objects appear as a mass of plain, brown sand: homogeneous, simple and flat. Under a microscope, the different parts come alive, each piece taking on a distinct colour, formation and intriguing aesthetic. Microscopic grains of sand tell individual stories about the ecosystems and ecologies from which they came, originating from diverse corals, sea urchins and structural components such as algae and sponges. Finer than pebbles but coarser than silt, sand also articulates narratives of transformation and change, from volcanic eruption and mountainous erosion to shifting seabeds across millions of years of planetary evolution.With this image in mind, we train our attention on small data and its power to fascinate, slow and attune us to matters we might otherwise skate over. Capturing the 'so what' of the magnified gaze, Small Data is Beautiful contends that attention to the minor scale can inform major social issues. It anchors us at the heart of political questions about what registers or qualifies, what is included or excluded or what becomes (of) an outlier. The small's way of ushering in change may have a different texture - starting as a seed, an itch, an earworm, something that soon spirals. It requires us to generate nimble methods to notice, scrutinise and sometimes seize chances to transform how we live with and by data. Such happenings are best captured in the kaleidoscope of small data that turns across the chapters in this volume, but here we offer three prisms for thinking about what small data can do: Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics. Deliberately general, though not exhaustive, they focalise the power of the particular.The book is structured around four themes: Narratives, Intimacies, Representations and Ecologies. Each theme intersects with concepts of smallness in distinct ways, providing a roadmap for reconceptualising data in an age of turmoil, resistance and ecological change.

In this stunning experimental mix of memoir and fictocriticism, Emma Marie Jones unravels the sinuous complexities of grief, loss, memory and femininity. Drawing on elements of Greek mythology and literary theory in ways that are surprising and imaginative, Something to Be Tiptoed Around is both deeply affecting and utterly human."When you are a writer and a sore little piece of yourself breaks off and crystallises, you name it and you write a world for it and it becomes a story..."

Author Robert Hassan believes we are trapped in a digital prison of constant distraction. In Uncontained, he books a passage on a container ship and spends five weeks travelling from Melbourne to Singapore without digital distractions -- disconnected, and essentially alone.In this space of isolation and reflection, he is able to reconnect with lost memories and interrogate the lived experience of time.Uncontained is a personal exploration of this journey and a must-read for anyone who feels the encroachment of the digital upon their inner world.The first academic monograph from Grattan Street Press.

An Australian Bush Track (1896) is a dark novel, a colonial fantasy-adventure by author J.D. Hennessey in the style of H. Rider Haggard's She. The story of an expedition into the Queensland interior by a group of speculators hot on the trail of fabulous wealth, its heroine is a charismatic young bushwoman equipped with heedless courage, a fast horse and a rifle. The novel is unrepressed in its representation of colonial racism and the driving forces behind it: frontier violence and dispossession, land acquisition and the relentless pursuit of wealth and resources.An Australian Bush Track takes us on an expedition to unknown territories, encountering lost worlds and inland seas. Along the way there are amorous train journeys, coach chases, Aboriginal attacks, shoot outs and unwanted marriage proposals. The novel also gives us an Australian girl who charts her own route through a speculative male fantasy.The edition includes an introductions by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver.

An Australian Girl in London, first published in 1902, is an endearing look at the journey of self-discovery that many young women of means made to the heart of Empire around the time of Federation. Its author, Louise Mack, a friend and rival of Ethel Turner, captures the experience of a provincial young woman immersing herself in the epic metropolis of London - its hard urban edges, and the challenges it poses for colonial talent, but also its rich history and culture.Sylvia Leighton embarks on an increasingly familiar narrative in turn-of-the-century Australian fiction, travelling to England to establish herself in a country she has long dreamed of visiting. Fellow Australian Emmie Jones joins her, and the two girls share a boarding house and a very close bond.'The first impressions of a thoughtful and observant person are worth having, especially when they are pleasantly and vividly recorded.' - Sydney Morning Herald

A bad-tempered squatter is murdered in country Victoria and the local townsfolk are swept up in the rush to solve the crime. Will the squatters beautiful daughter, Flora McAlpin, save her lover from the gallows? Or is the circumstantial evidence against him too strong?Ellen Davitts Force and Fraud: A Tale of the Bush is a feisty account of a murder investigation in the colonies that takes the twists and turns of English sensation fiction in a uniquely Australian direction. The novel brings an innovative forensic eye to its crime, reinventing the squatter romance as it takes its characters from country to city and from public house to courthouse. Force and Fraud was serialised in the popular, long-running Australian Journal from 2 September to 18 November 1865.This edition includes an introduction by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver.';a romance with a tight mystery plot . . . an assured whodunnit'Lucy Sussex, Blockbuster! Fergus Hume and the Mystery of a Hansom Cab (2015) ';Force and Fraud is pioneering in its status as the first murder mystery in Australia . . .'Kate Watson, Women Writing Crime Fiction, 1860-1880 (2012)

John Lang was Australias first locally born novelist, publishing early work in Sydney in the 1840s and going on to write several bestsellers. The Forgers Wife (1856) is a lively adventure novel, set in an unruly colonial Sydney where everyone is on the make. The forgers wife is a young woman who follows her rakish husband out to Australia and struggles to survive as her marriage falls apart. She soon meets detective George Flower, a powerful man with a cavalier sense of justice and retribution. Flower literally controls the fortunes of the colony: taking on the local bushrangers, instructing colonial authorities, and helping himself to the spoils along the way.First serialised in Frasers Magazine in 1853, The Forgers Wife was popular in its day and was reprinted many times over. It is Australias first detective novel and most likely, the first detective novel in the Anglophone world.This ebook edition includes an introduction by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver, and a translation of the appendix by Sophie Zins. The text includes both the lightly modernised text of the print edition as well as the unamended original text.It is a powerful, if occasionally painful, book. It sells even now in all the colonies and in England by the thousand...Rolf Boldrewood on Australian Literature, The Advocate (Melbourne), 20 May 1893