I recently attended the American Historical Association meeting in Chicago where I gave a presentation on Invisible Australians in Session 138: ‘Crowdsourcing History: Collaborative Online Transcription and Archives’.

You can find out more at the session blog, where you also contribute details of your own crowdsourcing projects. Session 138 also came equipped with its very own hashtag and managed to generate a remarkable 200+ tweets. A fascinating collection of projects was discussed, both by the panel and by contributors from the audience.

My presentation introduced the records created through the administration of the White Australia Policy and talked about how Invisible Australians aims to extract and link biographical information about the people forced to live within its restrictions. It’s going to be a lot of work and we’re going to need your help! Stay tuned for news about our first online working bee.

You can browse my slides on SlideShare:

Invisible Australians: Living under the White Australia Policy

As well as plenty of positive Twitter coverage, Invisible Australians was mentioned in Jennifer Howard’s round-up of the AHA conference in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

It’s encouraging to find so much international interest in our project and it points towards some interesting collaborations in the future.