Small Is Big

2018 AHA Conference, CBE Building Foyer, Day 3. Source : #OzHA2018, Twitter.

Small is Big …

at the Australian Historical Association Conference on 3-4 July 2018 at the Australian National University, Acton, Canberra

Dr Buch presented a paper called, “Small is Big: Scaling the Map for Brisbane Persons and Institutions 1823-2000” at the AHA Conference on 4 July 2018.

The Mapping Brisbane History Project is a new website tool for historians wishing to undertake geographic-oriented investigations, across 64 local study areas within the city’s present-day boundaries, from the colonial period to the present day. It was launched in June 2018 with over 1,000 sites marked with entries by epochs and local areas, with further expansion planned. A related project on ‘Brisbane Thinkers and Local Researching, Educating, and Informing Institutions’ is now taking shape, extending the idea of how institutions can be mapped as sites in the landscape to how institutions of formative thinkers can be mapped through conceptual networking. In both projects, the work is performed on the local scale yet important national and global dimensions came to the fore.

Using these digital projects, this paper reflects on balancing the demands of scale in avoiding provincial outlooks without imposing a false and bland globalist perspective. The approach fits with the attention given to intersecting local, regional and global networks by historians in recent years, as in Niall Ferguson’s The Square and Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power.

A PDF copy of the business report on the ‘Small is Big’ presentation, and analysis on the value of the history consultancy business in relation to papers presented at the AHA Conference, can be found here.

A PDF copy of the PowerPoint Notes Pages for the ‘Small is Big’ presentation can be found here.

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Neville Buch

Professional Historian at Professional Historians Association (Queensland) Inc.

Neville Buch (Pronounced Book) Ph.D. is a certified member of the Professional Historians Association (Queensland). Since 2010 he has operated a sole trade business in history consultancy. He was a Q ANZAC 100 Fellow 2014-2015 at the State Library of Queensland. Dr Buch was the PHA (Qld) e-Bulletin, the monthly state association’s electronic publication, and was a member of its Management Committee. He is the Managing Director of the Brisbane Southside History Network.

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