The Flight of Ducks is a multi-purpose on-line work built around a collection of archival material from a camel expedition into central Australia in 1933. This journey was revisited in 1976 and retraced in 1996. As a digital work, it takes the form of a journey through a datascape. It tells an important and on-going story of intercultural contact and explores how different forms of access can be used to create a responsive participatory documentary. Like the stories of journeys in oral epic poetry, it has evolved into a proliferating evolving organism, shaped by its participants, by a continuous refinement of the poetics of the medium and by a concern to facilitate long-term access to its content.
The hypertexts that form this research report are hyper-linked to each other and to the material they describe. They are also embedded in the context of an on-going electronic conversation. Each hypertext examines a question about access:
Tangible outcomes include:
- What forms of encoding architecture are likely to assist long term access to digital material?
- What narrative structures will assist accessibility?
- How can restricted access be used to accommodate the cultural sensitivities inherent in the public presentation of material relating to Australian Aborigines
- Formal, public archiving by the National Library of Australia.
- A description of an infrastructure framework to support digital preservation.
- An Award winning on-line (and on-going) documentary.
- The development of an on-line architecture for the handling of Aboriginal cultural sensitivities.
- Protocols for the submission, storage and examination of on-line projects.
- University censorship of an approved research project.