Mitchell Whitelaw’s groundbreaking project for the 2008 Ian Maclean Award is called 'The visible archive'. He will use creative visualisation to interpret large sets of archival data, in order to support and inform both archivists and archive users. This is a burgeoning area in the field of online access and discovery. His project will create prototype interactive, browsable maps of the National Archives collection that apply these techniques at different structural levels.
A map of the whole collection will show the ‘big picture’ – the size, scope and historical distribution of different series of records, the relations between them, and their corresponding agencies and functions. A more detailed map will focus, as a test case, on a single series, accumulating data from individual records to reveal the distinctive ‘shape’ of that series.
You can keep track of the project's progress at his blog, 'The visible archive'.
Dr Mitchell Whitelaw is an academic, writer and artist with interests in new media art and culture, especially generative systems and data aesthetics.
He has published in journals including Fibreculture, Leonardo, Contemporary Music Review, Digital Creativity and Media International Australia, and presented at conferences and festivals including Digital Arts and Culture, Dutch Electronic Arts Festival and Electrofringe. His research on a-life art was published as Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life (MIT Press, 2004).
His recent work spans theory and practice in generative art and design and data visualisation. He teaches in the Faculty of Design and Creative Practice at the University of Canberra, and blogs at The teeming void.