Professor Michael Twidale has joined a research collaboration based at the University of Tasmania (UTAS) that seeks to discover correlations between the treatment of convicts sentenced to transportation from Europe to Tasmania in the first half of the nineteenth century and health trends among their descendants.
UTAS Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart is leading the research group in the project titled, “Treating Criminals from Shore to Ship: Public Health, Humanitarianism and Convict Transportation.” Throughout his research into intergenerational health issues, Maxwell-Stewart has found direct links between experiences of prisoners and health trends among their descendants, now the modern population of the island.
“We have found for example, that children of convicts were taller than other colonially born children, such as those born to free laborers who migrated [to Tasmania] from England. Our research suggests that this is due to smaller family size, which meant fewer mouths to feed and therefore better overall nutrition,” he states on his website.
An important aspect of the research involves digitizing the prisoner transport records that provide a starting point for this work. Twidale will advise the research group in digitizing the data and visualizing it.
“[A primary focus is] finding new ways of visualizing the findings, because a lot of this data can be a bit inaccessible…The question is, can we use new visualization techniques to make it easier to understand the meaning of what’s in there or to spot patterns?” said Twidale.
Twidale is visiting UTAS on August 3-10 to work with Maxwell-Stewart and Christopher Lueg, professor of computing and a former GSLIS research fellow.
At Illinois, Twidale also holds appointments with the Department of Computer Science, the Information Trust Institute, and the Academy of Entrepreneurial Leadership. His research interests include computer-supported cooperative work, computer-supported collaborative learning, human-computer interaction, information visualization, and museum informatics.