The aim of the ARC-funded Resourceful Reading project is to re-examine and re-invigorate Australian literary criticism and history by integrating traditional, qualitative approaches to literary studies with empirically-rich methodologies including data-mining and quantitative analysis. This project aims to contribute to AustLit as well as to maximize the potential of this important, data-rich resource.

Outcomes of the Resourceful Reading project were a symposium held at the University of Sydney in December 2008 and the book, Resourceful Reading: The New Empiricism, eResearch and Australian Literary Culture, edited by Katherine Bode and Robert Dixon, and published by Sydney University Press in 2009.

Purchase the book Resourceful Reading through Sydney University Press here. Flyer available here.

The digital end-product of the ARC Discovery Project (2007-2010), the Resourceful Reading Research Community is composed of data resulting from four separate but linked research projects. In different ways, each project re-examines Australian literary history and criticism by integrating traditional, qualitative approaches to literary studies with new, data-rich methodologies. A leading example of what has been called the 'new empiricism' in Australian literary studies, the Resourceful Reading approach aims to revise the legacy of theoretically-driven literary history and criticism, and to generate new ways of writing literary history and reading texts.

Many of the new methodologies employed in resourceful readings are enabled by (though not restricted to) eResearch strategies, including data-basing, data-mining, modelling, quantitative analysis and geo-spatial mapping. Such innovation is necessary to keep pace with digitised information now available to Australian literary studies, and with changes to the way that humanities research is undertaken internationally.

AustLit is a leading force in this new, technologically-aware era in Australian literary studies, and the Resourceful Reading project, in the manner of digital era scholarship, is dedicated to contributing to AustLit as a central resource for the study Australian literary cultures.

Each of the Resourceful Reading projects was designed to have both traditional and non-traditional scholarly outcomes. Formal scholarly publications are able to be enhanced by the data and detailed information collected through the course of the projects and made available in a shareable format through AustLit while forming the basis for textual theoretical analysis.

Professor Whitlock's component of the Resourceful Reading project focuses on processes of selection, connection and interpretation of texts in critical anthologies in Australian Literature. AustLit is being used to explore a hypothesised increase in the publication of anthologies late last century and the role of the anthology in the debates about Australian literature, culture and society.

Two case studies were developed:

(i) How does the information now available lead to revisions about theories of feminism and Australian writing that shaped the critical introduction to an edited collection of women's writing: Eight Voices of the Eighties (1989)?

(ii) What has been the role of the anthology in fostering Indigenous writing in Australia?

The article 'Voices from the Past: Gender, Politics, and the Anthology' discusses the results of this project.

Increasingly, it seems that overseas rights and translation contracts are initiated by publishers and their scouts at events such as the Frankfurt and London trade fares. Are these commercial arrangements similar throughout the world or do they vary from one culture to another? As if confirming Lawrence Venuti's claim for the translator's 'invisibility', there is to date no systematic, empirically-informed account of this translation zone in Australian literary scholarship. This part of the Resourceful Reading project aims to answer some of these research questions by populating the metaphor of the 'translation zone' with real data.

Professor Dixon has argued for the value of thinking about Australian writing as belonging not just to the nation but also to an expanded field in which national literatures come into being in complex and competitive relations between what Pascale Casanova calls 'the literary province' and 'world literary space'. Central to the cultural economy of this expanded field is the role of the translator, so often rendered 'invisible', as Venuti has observed. Australian writers and Australian literature have never been confined to the boundaries of the nation, but are implicated in what Emily Apter calls 'the translation zone', which she describes as 'a broad intellectual topography that is neither the property of a single nation, nor an amorphous condition associated with postnationalism, but rather a zone of critical engagement that connects the "l" and the "n" of transLation and transNation'. Literary influences, intellectual formations, careers in writing, and the processes of editing, publication, translation, reception and reputation-making take place both within and beyond the nation, and in more than one language.

Apter's 'translation zone' is of course a spatial metaphor. But to understand how that space operates we need to move beyond close reading. A resourceful reading approach can begin to populate Apter's metaphoric space with real data. Thus, this project employs the following interrogatory framework to pursue these lines of investigation:

What might a transnational practice of Australian literary criticism that aimed to overcome the translator's invisibility look like?

What kinds of research questions would it ask?

What kinds of data and readings would we need to develop a transnational perspective, to see Australian literature in the translation zone?

Is there a single translation zone, or are there as many translation zones beyond Australian literature as there are other languages and translators?

Beyond English, does the reputation of an Australian book or writer spread from one foreign language to another, or are they siloed, communicating back through English?

Is the impact of successive translations cumulative throughout a writer's oeuvre, or is each translation a new beginning?

How important are paratextual phenomena and events?

How important is the agency of the author and translator in relation to other personnel, including authors' and publishers' agents, publishers, editors, and publishers' scouts, in commissioning translations?

'Australian Literature in the Translation Zone: Robert Dessaix and David Malouf' is an exploration of some of these questions.

Professor Dale's project began from the premise that the academic study of literature - traditionally the focus of studies of individual writers' reputations - is only one part of a broader and more complex 'ecology' of literature, and that the circulation and reception of texts can productively be analysed in the light of this larger context. Whilst the AustLit database had good quality modern records for newspaper reviews of literary works, the country press is a virtually unmined source of data for Australian literary studies particularly of an earlier period, roughly from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

As a sample or pilot project for the rest of this period this project focused on Australian newspaper reviews of 1930. It aims to establish some parameters by which a larger dataset can be created; to analyse the relationship between different forms of literary content (advertising, reviews, mentions and other literary discussion) in newspapers, particularly in terms of the balance between Australian and other literatures; and to examine the relationship between reviewing, advertising and other discussion in relation to specific key texts and writers, as some key publications. Broadly, the project aims to complicate, qualify and solidify claims about the Anglo-centrism of publishing, criticism and reading, using a dramatically expanded dataset.

See all reviews listed in AustLit for 1930 here.

The article, 'Books in Selected Australian Newspapers, December 1930' by Robert Thomson and Leigh Dale is an exploration of the project and its outcomes.

This project uses AustLit records to explore Australian literary and publishing history from a quantitative perspective. This approach provides opportunities to ask simple but broad questions about Australian literature.

For example:

How many Australian novel titles have been published?

Do any trends in the gender of Australian authors emerge?

Do trends in Australian literature correspond to those in other national literatures?

Such questions have been asked and answered in the past - but predominantly on the basis of close readings of individual texts rather than data.

In many cases, quantitative results reveal hitherto unrecognised trends in, and challenge key assumptions made about, Australian literary history. The range of issues examined was broad, and included trends and cycles in the gender of novelists; the formation of fictional genres and literary canons; publishing industry dynamics and shifts; the relationship between publication of different fictional forms, such as novels and poetry; the interactions between literary production and criticism; and the relationship between national dynamics and transnational movements and trends.

For some results of the research undertaken for this aspect of the project, see: 'From British Domination to Multinational Conglomeration?: A Revised History of Australian Novel Publishing, 1950-2007'