Australian Fiction

In the literary world, it was an accepted assumption that the 1970s was a time of unprecedented growth in homegrown Australian fiction. And everybody was reading and talking about books by young Australian women.But it was not until recently that a researcher was able to measure just how many novels were published in that decade, and she found that there had been a decline in novels by Australian writers overall, but confirmed an increase in women's novels.It is this sort of research - testing ideas about literary history - that is becoming possible with the spread of 'Digital Humanities.' The intersection of Humanities and digital technologies is opening up opportunities in the fields of literature, linguistics, history and language that were not possible without computational methods and digitised resources to bring information together in an accessible way. Transcription software is being developed for turning scans of books and documents into text, as the field of digital humanities really takes off .