In its early days, the methods and theories of the digital humanities promised to reform our understanding of the canon, or, given a comprehensive archive of literature and the tools for analyzing all of it, even abolish it all together. Although these earlier utopian hopes for digital archives and computational text analysis have proven to be ill founded, the points of contact between the canon and the digital humanities have had a profound effect on both. From studies that test the formal properties of canonical literature to those that seek to explore the depths of newly available archives, the canon has remained an object of significant interest for scholars working in these burgeoning fields. This chapter explores the fraught relationship between the canon and computational analysis, arguing that, in the hands of cultural analytics, the canon has transformed from a prescriptive to a descriptive technology of literary study.

This chapter outlines a novel, rigorous method for studying literary recordings, which can support a paradigm shift in the study of literature as performance. The method incorporates leading-edge, open-source digital tools for analyzing speech patterns in recordings, and an ethically grounded approach to analysis, with attention to the neuroscience of speech perception, implicit bias in listening, and relevant theories of sound studies and voice studies. It also includes an overview of our own work on poetry recordings and of related developments in digital voice studies, and speculates about future directions for this research.

Festivals are one of the main contemporary forums in which Indigenous Australian public ceremony is staged, learned, shared and increasingly, revived. In this chapter we review the literature on public ceremony at Indigenous festivals, focusing on Junba at the Mowanjum festival in the Kimberley and Kun-borrk/Manyardi at the Stone Country and Mahbilil festivals in western Arnhem Land/Kakadu. We consider festivals as serving several purposes: Firstly, as a forum for cultural revival, reclamation, and maintenance, supporting language and song revival and reclamation work by local individuals, groups and Indigenous businesses. Secondly, as a forum for education and diplomacy, serving as powerful statements of Indigenous sovereignty, identity, law and diplomacy which educate the broader public. Thirdly, as a site for continuity and innovation of practice. We examine how performers in the Kimberley use Junba to transform society to address inequity and discrimination in wider Australian society, and performers in western Arnhem Land use Kun-borrk/Manyardi at festivals to support interdependence and reciprocity enacted as part of regional ceremonial practices and ideologies of being ‘different together’.

Computer-generated literary art has been developed for decades across languages and genres, a history we survey. In recent years, it has increasingly been produced by author/programmers: people who fully engage with literary and computational aspects and who sustain a practice in digital literary art rather than undertaking a single experiment. Focusing on those cases where computer systems produce output that is then published, we consider computer-generated literary work in poetry, prose fiction, and minor genres from the 1950s up though the beginning of the 2020s. We argue that such literature uniquely explores machine voices, computer cognition, and other aspects of computing within culture. The text generation systems that are the most hyped at the beginning of 2023 (ChatGPT foremost among them) are proprietary, opaque, and presented as entirely novel, with no historical precedent. In our discussion, we provide several ways to see how an understanding of computing and computer programs gives insight into the rich history of literary text generation and relates to important ongoing work in the area.

This chapter explores the development of youth music media and music festivals in Australia, and the synergies between them. This includes the national expansion in the 1990s of public youth radio station Triple J, and its ABC television counterparts rage and Recovery, in parallel with a new wave of music festivals like the Big Day Out, Homebake and Livid. This infrastructure and these events were central to a period of transition for Australian popular music. Local alternative scenes developed into a translocal industrial sub-sector, marketing a distinct national identity and incorporating urban and regional youth audiences. Cultural institutions and practices established during this time, such as the modern music festival and the celebration of ‘homegrown’ Australian artists, continue to be influential. This chapter draws on secondary texts and scholarly literature to map and connect these developments, which are analysed using scene theory.

This chapter examines the production, circulation, and reception of books in the digital landscape, comprising a complicated entanglement between bricks-and-mortar bookstores and digital technologies that transforms every aspect of the way books are produced, published, distributed, and experienced. The history of the relationship between bookselling, reading devices, publishing and printing platforms, and the shape of the literary marketplace in the digital age reveals elements of the publishing circuit that are examined along with the increasing platformization of cultural production. The digital literary sphere affects authorship and the remuneration authors receive; the increased conflation between publishing and bookselling; the tension between e-books and print, and online versus bricks-and-mortar stores; and the relationship between fan fiction and literary consumption. The literary marketplace in the digital age is one marked by flux, but also the rise of new forms of access and new meaning for books and literature in the digital age.

This chapter explores the music histories of two internationally recognizable Australian sites – The Sydney Opera House and Uluru. By examining music’s relationship with place, the chapter discusses millennial-old musical histories, early colonial negotiations and contemporary musical encounters. The world-renowned Sydney Opera House opened to gala performances, protest and acclaim in 1973. Positioned on Sydney Harbour, the site has variously been known as Bennelong Point and Tubowgule, has fostered music making for millennia, and continues to be symbolic of Australia’s musical identity. Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock) is a Dreaming site and geological phenomenon in Australia’s geographical ‘Red Centre’ with long-established importance in Anangu songlines, which also holds significant symbolic value in contemporary music making. Centring this account in place, the chapter explores the musical encounters that have shaped music in Australia across time, drawing attention to the acoustic possibilities of Country, people and stories of the past.

What is literary data? This chapter addresses this question by examining how the concept of data functioned during a formative moment in academic literary study around the turn of the twentieth century and again at the beginning of electronic literary computing. The chapter considers the following cases: Lucius Adelno Sherman’s Analytics of Literature (1893), the activities of the Concordance Society (c.1906–28), Lane Cooper’s A Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth (1911), and the work of Stephen M. Parrish c.1960. The chapter explains how the concept of literary data was used by literature scholars to signal a commitment to a certain epistemological framework that was opposed to other ways of knowing and reading in the disciplinary field.

This chapter examines the relationship between “critique” as a mode of literary work and digital literary studies. It provides a brief genealogy of the origins of critique in early modern textual criticism and eighteenth-century disputes over autonomous criticism, and connects that genealogy to contemporary schools of critique. The debates over critique in digital literary studies are surveyed, along with a range of work in feminist, postcolonial, intersectional, Marxist, and other forms of cultural critique. It analyzes the recent turn to work in “postcritique” and allied theoretical modes, and indicates areas of shared interest as well as boundaries between digital literary studies and the cultures of critique.

The performance of ‘Chinese music’ in Australian has a long and varied history. Performances of sonic arts which display a Chinese origin or connection range across various genres including classical, folk, opera, popular and sacred music. The performers are and have been equally diverse, including immigrants, international students, visiting artists and cosmopolitans from mainland China, the Sinosphere and the population of ‘Chinese overseas’, as well as people born or permanently residing in Australia of both Chinese and non-Chinese heritage. This chapter focuses on contemporary practice of different genres and on ethnographic examples from our own experience, but as space and historical records allow, we also look back in time. Our discussion illustrates some of the main ways that music has served to enhance social connections within and beyond Australia’s Chinese community, including within an Australian sociocultural fabric that has increasingly acknowledged and valued cultural diversity and multiplicities of cultural identity.

This concluding chapter considers the dynamics of music and place, issues of diversity, and the impact of Indigenous artists on building bridges to a whole history of music in this place. Reflecting on the four interlinked themes guiding this Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia: Continuities, Encounters, Diversities, and Institutions, it takes up musical threads not covered elsewhere in the volume, discussing pub rock and hip hop to consider dynamics of exclusion, inclusion, and identity. In advocating for a move away from anthropocentrism toward ecocentrism in considering the relationships between music and the place now known as Australia, it simultaneously foregrounds unresolved tensions associated with Indigeneity, settler-colonialism, and prejudice in music that are ultimately intertwined with concepts of place and belonging.

This chapter explores two important interlinked strands in relation to Australian children’s music—children’s music informed by music education philosophy and pedagogy and children’s music informed by popular music. The chapter focuses on music for young children made by adults rather than music that children independently create for themselves. It also centres on television as a medium for engaging children with music. We begin with a social and cultural exploration of the main influencer of this genre, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) children’s television program Play School. We position this icon of Australian children’s culture as a leader in the development of children’s music, specifically linked to an educational agenda. We then explore the ways children’s music and the music industry intersect with a focus on two other popular Australian children’s television programs: Bluey and the variety of television series produced by children entertainers The Wiggles. Finally, we turn to how these programs represent race and otherness through song and ask questions about how these children’s programs attempt to empower both Indigenous and non-Indigenous children to sing, think and embody positive understandings about race in Australia.

Country music is one of Australia’s oldest popular music forms, stretching from the 1920s (when it was known as hillbilly) to today. It also shows a remarkable continuity of tradition. Despite country music’s reputation as being politically conservative and white, in Australia country has often pursued a progressive agenda and has featured many Aboriginal and women artists. Songwriters have used country music’s robust musical forms to tell richly detailed and diverse stories about life in Australia, from rural labour, to urbanization, to sexual and racial double standards, to economic woes, to familial bonds, to the ravages of the climate. Despite this rich history, and the genre’s rootedness in place, there remain many anxieties surrounding country music to do with its perceived ‘Americanness’, itself symptomatic of larger anxieties around national identity. While hillbilly music originated in America, musically, lyrically and culturally it has developed in new and fascinating ways in Australia.