Böcker utgivna av Grattan Street Press, University of Melbourne

Small Data is Beautiful investigates the conceptual, artistic, and computational qualities of small data. This original collection presents a challenge to discussions centred on big data - algorithms, surveillance and the datafication of human lives - by exploring the seditious and revelatory potential of radically rethinking data in creative research and practice. Taking inspiration from the 'small is beautiful' mantra of the 1970s, a counter-cultural pursuit of planetary survival, the book interrogates the scale of the digital age through narratives, intimacies, representations, and ecologies. It offers a rich interdisciplinary dialogue from perspectives including cultural history, sociology, visual art, performance studies, archaeology, musicology, literary studies, and data science. On the cover of this collection is an image that is both ordinary and remarkable, depending on where you place your focus. To the naked eye and from a distance, these striking jewel-like objects appear as a mass of plain, brown sand: homogeneous, simple and flat. Under a microscope, the different parts come alive, each piece taking on a distinct colour, formation and intriguing aesthetic. Microscopic grains of sand tell individual stories about the ecosystems and ecologies from which they came, originating from diverse corals, sea urchins and structural components such as algae and sponges. Finer than pebbles but coarser than silt, sand also articulates narratives of transformation and change, from volcanic eruption and mountainous erosion to shifting seabeds across millions of years of planetary evolution.With this image in mind, we train our attention on small data and its power to fascinate, slow and attune us to matters we might otherwise skate over. Capturing the 'so what' of the magnified gaze, Small Data is Beautiful contends that attention to the minor scale can inform major social issues. It anchors us at the heart of political questions about what registers or qualifies, what is included or excluded or what becomes (of) an outlier. The small's way of ushering in change may have a different texture - starting as a seed, an itch, an earworm, something that soon spirals. It requires us to generate nimble methods to notice, scrutinise and sometimes seize chances to transform how we live with and by data. Such happenings are best captured in the kaleidoscope of small data that turns across the chapters in this volume, but here we offer three prisms for thinking about what small data can do: Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics. Deliberately general, though not exhaustive, they focalise the power of the particular.The book is structured around four themes: Narratives, Intimacies, Representations and Ecologies. Each theme intersects with concepts of smallness in distinct ways, providing a roadmap for reconceptualising data in an age of turmoil, resistance and ecological change.

A bad-tempered squatter is murdered in country Victoria and the local townsfolk are swept up in the rush to solve the crime. Will the squatters beautiful daughter, Flora McAlpin, save her lover from the gallows? Or is the circumstantial evidence against him too strong?Ellen Davitts Force and Fraud: A Tale of the Bush is a feisty account of a murder investigation in the colonies that takes the twists and turns of English sensation fiction in a uniquely Australian direction. The novel brings an innovative forensic eye to its crime, reinventing the squatter romance as it takes its characters from country to city and from public house to courthouse. Force and Fraud was serialised in the popular, long-running Australian Journal from 2 September to 18 November 1865.This edition includes an introduction by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver.';a romance with a tight mystery plot . . . an assured whodunnit'Lucy Sussex, Blockbuster! Fergus Hume and the Mystery of a Hansom Cab (2015) ';Force and Fraud is pioneering in its status as the first murder mystery in Australia . . .'Kate Watson, Women Writing Crime Fiction, 1860-1880 (2012)

Intermissions is an anthology of over 60 original short stories, exploring the complexity of the human condition. The collection brings together musings on love and loss, experimentation, isolation, suffering, intimacy and connection, environmental collapse and the Anthropocene. Carefully curated by Grattan Street Press, this eclectic selection of stories from both Australian and international writers is haunting, uplifting, moving and absurd. We invite you to traverse its pages to discover the diversity of voices reflective of an ever-changing world.

John Lang was Australias first locally born novelist, publishing early work in Sydney in the 1840s and going on to write several bestsellers. The Forgers Wife (1856) is a lively adventure novel, set in an unruly colonial Sydney where everyone is on the make. The forgers wife is a young woman who follows her rakish husband out to Australia and struggles to survive as her marriage falls apart. She soon meets detective George Flower, a powerful man with a cavalier sense of justice and retribution. Flower literally controls the fortunes of the colony: taking on the local bushrangers, instructing colonial authorities, and helping himself to the spoils along the way.First serialised in Frasers Magazine in 1853, The Forgers Wife was popular in its day and was reprinted many times over. It is Australias first detective novel and most likely, the first detective novel in the Anglophone world.This ebook edition includes an introduction by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver, and a translation of the appendix by Sophie Zins. The text includes both the lightly modernised text of the print edition as well as the unamended original text.It is a powerful, if occasionally painful, book. It sells even now in all the colonies and in England by the thousand...Rolf Boldrewood on Australian Literature, The Advocate (Melbourne), 20 May 1893