We caught up with Dr Fiannuala (Finn) Morgan to talk about her fascinating project, Historic Fires Near Me – an experimental visualisation of nineteenth century bushfire reporting which forms part of her ongoing research reconstructing Australian bushfire records from 1850 to 1900. The idea was sparked by the devastation of the Black Summer bushfires in 2019–20 and the troubling media narratives that downplay the growing severity of bushfires in Australia. Finn wanted to dig deeper into the historical record to see what the past could tell us.

As a librarian by trade with a passion for literature, Finn turned to Trove’s enormous archive of newspapers and journals. To extract and synthesise this data, she taught herself to code, using a mix of techniques – from simple searches to more advanced methods like Named Entity Recognition. The result is a browser-based tool that reveals where fires occurred and how often, across the colonies, over a fifty-year span.

In this conversation with SLV LAB’s Innovation Lead, Sotirios Alpanis, Finn shares what inspired her research and how anyone can learn to wrangle messy cultural data as she did. She also spoke about the distinct fire histories of different Australian colonies and the ways fire was used as a tool of colonisation in Victoria.

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There's a common misconception that assistive technologies only benefit a few – namely those with special access needs. However, innovations like voice assistants, text-to-speech and captions are things most of us use everyday, and at some point in our lives we or someone we know will rely on assistive technologies.

Dr Scott Hollier, CEO & co-founder of the Centre For Accessibility Australia, joins us to discuss digital access tools and creative approaches that make digital spaces easier to navigate. He shares how early design choices, strong accessibility standards and lived experience can shape richer online projects, including the Library’s award-winning Mouthful of Dust web experience.

The conversation looks at emerging guidelines, the pros and cons of AI-driven accessible tech and the vital role libraries play in protecting information integrity while opening access to more people.

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Galleries. Libraries. Archives. Museums. Every day, artists and cultural workers face tough ethical calls on AI. Could artists show us a new way forward?

What if ethics wasn’t about ticking boxes, but about how we act, care and respond in the moment? In their new book Decentring Ethics: AI art as method (Open Humanities Press, 2025), Vanessa Bartlett, Jasmin Pfefferkorn and Emilie K. Sunde explore how artists using AI are raising new questions about responsibility and creativity. The book challenges the idea of ethics as a fixed code, instead showing how it plays out in real practice.

In the following podcast recording with Vanessa and Jasmin, we discuss how the GLAM sector – galleries, libraries, archives and museums – navigates these ethical choices, and how artists and arts workers can help us imagine new ways forward.

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Artist and technologist Amelia Winger-Bearskin explains the definition-redefining role of the artist in Indigenous communities, and shares how storytelling can help us move from isolated paralysis to proud collective action in response to the global water crisis, as seen in her 2022 project Talk to Me About Water. Amelia introduces the concept of positive human thriving as a central focus when considering where and how to incorporate advanced technologies into our lives, and reflects on living through the creation story of AI.

This conversation is presented by State Library Victoria in partnership with Frame Documentary and the Consulate General of the United States – Melbourne.

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What does an innovation "lab" look like inside a library – and why do other cultural institutions like galleries, archives and museums need them now?

On 1 May 2025, on the cusp of launching SLV LAB at State Library Victoria, Ana Tiquia (Head of Innovation and Research, State Library Victoria) and Paula Bray (Chief Digital Officer, State Library Victoria) unpacked how labs help galleries, libraries, archives and museums keep pace with fast-moving technologies, by creating space for curiosity, experimentation and shared learning.

Paula reflects on lessons from early digital work at the Powerhouse Museum and six years leading the State Library of NSW’s DX Lab – where inviting technologists and artists in, documenting experiments, and publishing openly helped ideas travel beyond one organisation.

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