Recordkeeping and Surveillance
This project is concerned with the role of recordkeeping in the surveillance of ‘suspect’ populations. In particular, I’m exploring two sets of records held by the National Archives of Australia – records created through the workings of the White Australia Policy, and surveillance files created by ASIO. In both cases I’m interested in working back from the surviving records to understand more about the systems that created them. Can we turn state surveillance back on itself?
Recent updates
- Missing ASIO files, 19 Dec 2016
- Using OCR to identify documents, 09 Sep 2016
Show all 2 notes.
Sites
- Open With Exception – browse digitised ASIO files
- Redacted – explore redactions extracted from ASIO files
- The #redactionart story
Presentations
- “The badge of the outsider”: Open access and closed boundaries
- Turning the inside out – keynote at Australian Society of Archivists Annual conference, 19 October 2016, https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4055013.v1.
Code
- diy-redactionart repository on GitHub
- asio-files – code for harvesting files
- asio-experiments – includes code for extracting redactions
Data
- Redactions extracted from ASIO surveillance records in National Archives of Australia Series A6119, https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4101765.v1
- False positives (non-redactions) extracted from ASIO surveillance records in National Archives of Australia Series A6119, https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4104651.v1
- Data documenting redactions extracted from ASIO surveillance records in National Archives of Australia Series A6119, https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4128909.v1
| series | total described | total digitised | percentage digitised | total pages digitised | data |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A6119 | 6713 | 2131 | 31.74% | 228032 | CSV |
| A6122 | 2911 | 423 | 14.53% | 47954 | CSV |
| A6126 | 1376 | 325 | 23.62% | 12139 | CSV |
| A9626 | 899 | 479 | 53.28% | 7162 | CSV |