Deputy Director / Theme Leader: Digital Cultural Heritage
Melanie Swalwell is Professor of Digital Media Heritage. Her research focuses on the creation, use, preservation, and legacy of complex digital artefacts such as videogames and media artworks.
Melanie is the author of Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality (MIT Press), editor of Game History and the Local, and co-editor of Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives (Routledge, 2017) and The Pleasures of Computer Gaming: Essays on cultural history, theory and aesthetics (McFarland, 2008). As well as traditional publications, she has curated exhibitions and datasets, authored interactive essays, collected popular memories, and organised the preservation of digital artefacts. Melanie is frequently sought out for comment on the histories of games and computing, and has presented her research at many conferences nationally and internationally. Her most recent keynotes were at DH Days (Lausanne, Switzerland, 2022), and Collaborative Game Histories (Tampere, Finland, 2019).
Melanie manages the running of the Digital Heritage Lab at Swinburne, which is a facility for the imaging of disks and emulation of digital artefacts. She is currently leading three digital preservation projects: “Play It Again: Preserving Australian videogame history of the 1990s”, and “Archiving Australian Media Arts: Towards a best practice method and national collection”, and the rollout of the “Australian Emulation Network”, an ARC LIEF project awarded to a consortium of universities and GLAM organisations.
An ARC Future Fellow from 2014-18, Melanie is currently writing the monograph from this research Creative Micro-computing in Australia, 1976-92 and completing an anthology Crafting, Hacking, Making.