Wikipedia and Australian history and events

The PhD student will initiate and conduct a Doctoral research project affiliated with an Australian Research Council funded 3-year Discovery Project, Wikipedia and the nation’s story: Towards equity in knowledge production. The project’s Chief Investigators are Associate Professors Heather Ford and Tamson Pietsch.

The ARC Discovery project involves a systematic study of how Wikipedia represents historic Australian events, bringing together cutting-edge research approaches on Wikipedia’s systemic bias and its increasingly important role in national history-making, along with an international network that will be nurtured as part of the project. The project uses interviews, data visualisation, data analysis case studies, and participant observation.

The student will have the opportunity to undertake critical aspects of research on any of the following project objectives:

1. To provide a more comprehensive understanding of the ways that Wikipedia’s partiality has been framed and evaluated;

2. To map the scope of entries relating to Australian historic events on Wikipedia, and to identify and analyse omissions in relation to persons, events, or other relevant historical phenomena;

3. To investigate and interrogate that various ways that Wikipedia’s historical representations are constructed through users’ practices

Applicants must include in the application a project proposal, outlining topic and research question, research project aims, and preliminary description of design. Proposal templates and other information relating to HDR applications in FASS at UTS can be made available on request.