AustLit

'What happens when a human coder meets a machine one? This article explores this question with reference to the archive of Professor Germaine Greer: Australian-born feminist, performer, scholar, and professional controversialist. It does so by staging two very different data encounters with the 70,000-word finding aid for the print journalism series, a key component of Greer’s archive. The first encounter is archivist’s creation of the finding aid; the second, archivist and literary scholar’s interpretation of this archival metadata using sentiment analysis. Interrogating these activities side-by-side opens up a productive middle ground between humanities scholars and computer technicians, between historians and archivists, between the hand made and the machine made.'  (Publication abstract)

'In this article, I begin by sketching a brief biography of the Greer Archive when it was in the possession of its keeper and creator, explain how the University of Melbourne acquired the archive and describe how staff at UMA processed the collection once the 476 archival boxes arrived in Melbourne in 2014. The rest of the essay will focus on the Print Journalism series, one of the 20 series of about 25 planned series that have been listed to date. The series, which comprises 1268 items housed in 24 boxes, contains records relating to Greer’s writing for newspapers and magazines between 1959 and 2010. The Print Journalism series is analysed for evidence of Greer’s ability as a journalist and her ability as a recordkeeper. I conclude the paper by arguing that Greer’s methodical recordkeeping of her print journalism legacy is an implicit argument for the value of this writing. Without Greer’s archival labour, these non-anthologised, non-digitised, often small pieces of writing would be forgotten and the enormity of her print journalism output and its importance to both the archive and the work (and life) of the author would be lost.'  (Publication abstract)

'The pages of Germaine Greer’s University of Warwick diary for 1971 are mostly blank; she was too busy to fill them out. After April 20, 1971, publication day for The Female Eunuch in the United States, Greer plotted her life in single words or urgent phrases. Hamburg. Leave for Sardinia. Quarrel with Ken. Arr. Paris. Esquire Round Table Luncheon. Canada. WET DREAM. Hanoi?' (Introduction)

‘Traffic is like nature. Traffic flows and banks up, it weaves and surges. Traffic makes shadows and streams. It hums and screeches and throbs. Traffic glows in the dark. Traffic can be heavy or light, like the rain. You and your car are part of the traffic yet you also observe this phenomenon, 'traffic', as if you were not implicated in it at all.’ (Publication abstract)