Methods for analyzing and visualizing literary data receive substantially more attention in digital literary studies than the digital archives with which literary data are predominantly constructed. When discussed, digital archives are often perceived as entirely different from nondigital ones, and as passive – that is, as novel and enabling (or disabling) settings or backgrounds for research rather than active shapers of literary knowledge. This understanding produces abstract critiques of digital archives, and risks conflating events and trends in the histories of literary data with events and trends in literary history. By contrast, an emerging group of media-specific approaches adapt traditional philological and media archaeological methods to explore the complex and interdependent relationship between literary knowledges, technologies, and infrastructures.

This chapter briefly surveys the Australian Electronic Dance Music (EDM) scene throughout the 1990s. It examines the impact of financial investments from major labels and how this provided a fertile ground for specialist EDM labels to create scenes that connected back to the techno, rave, and club communities. Brief histories of Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, and Adelaide are provided, noting their different characteristics and prominent players in the field. Links between the post-punk electronic music scene and how they impacted the first wave of EDM creatives are also discussed. As one-half of Sydney techno band Itch-E & Scratch-E, the author (aka Paul Mac) provides a personal, practice-based, lived history of the period.

African musical practices in Australia are highly diverse and multifaceted. This chapter examines the work of a Senegalese Australian artist across contexts ranging from a new multimedia arts initiative, music festivals, community events and schools. Drawing on evidence from ethnographic research as well as performer and educator experiences, it shows that music provides an important space through which to explore the complexities of diasporic experience in Australia and to engage in self-representation countering dominant negative portrayals of Africans in Australian media and political discourse. Through music, African Australian artists negotiate ideas about cultural specificity and universality, maintaining connections to African cultural practices while forging new connections and forms of creativity in contemporary Australia.

This chapter examines the current state of jazz in Australia through the lens of notable practitioners—Andrea Keller, Simon Barker, Gian Slater, Kristin Berardi, Phil Slater and Jamie Oehlers. Presented as a panel discussion, the participants explore the term ‘jazz’ as it is perceived both by audiences and the practitioners themselves, discuss the challenges of presenting original music in a country as isolated as Australia, and question whether there is an audible Australian jazz ‘dialect’.

This Introduction provides an account of how Music in Australia has been conceptualised in previous music histories. It shows that music historians have sought to draw boundaries around what Australian music is by emphasizing the milestones of European settlement, and have often struggled to reconcile Indigenous music making and non-Indigenous music into one account of music in Australia. It explores also the history of cultural institutions in Australia that have built the foundations for music in Australia. Stepping back to look at these cultural institutions and the wide ranging music making in the past and present, the introduction summarises the book’s contents across the themes of Continuities, Encounters, Diversities and Institutions.

Narrative is a “mimesis” of human action, as defined by Aristotle. Mimesis is achieved by means of discourse, the combination of expressive signs available in a medium. In graphic narratives or story-manga, discourse utilizes three primary elements: image, word, and panel, with various expressive techniques developed for each. The actual signs of discourse, however, serve only as a starting point. It is by utilizing imaginative supplementation that the reader is able to interpret events, receive impressions, understand temporal and spatial transitions, and grasp the overall structure of the narrative world, that is, the story. The cognitive process of the reader can be broken down into three hypothetical phases: micro-, meso- and macroscopic. This chapter provides an outline of each phase in order to demonstrate the distinctiveness of manga as a narrative medium in terms of its expressive means and the resulting narrative experience.