The Dictionary of Sydney is a

digital humanities Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or Information technology, digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanitie ...

project to produce an online, expert-written encyclopaedia of all aspects of the

history of Sydney The history of Sydney is the story of the peoples of the land that has become modern Sydney. Indigenous Australians, Aboriginal Australians have inhabited the Sydney region for at least 30,000 years, and Australian archaeology, Aboriginal Syd ...

Description

The Dictionary is a partnership between the

City of Sydney The City of Sydney is the Local government in Australia, local government area covering the Sydney central business district and surrounding inner city suburbs of the Greater Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Established by Act of Parliament ...

, the

University of Sydney The University of Sydney (USYD) is a public university, public research university in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in both Australia and Oceania. One of Australia's six sandstone universities, it was one of the ...

, the

University of Technology Sydney The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) is a public university, public research university located in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. The university was founded in its current form in 1988, though its origins as a Institute of technology, ...

, the

State Library of New South Wales The State Library of New South Wales, part of which is known as the Mitchell Library, is a large heritage-listed special collections, reference and research library open to the public and is one of the oldest libraries in Australia. Establis ...

and the

State Records Authority of New South Wales The NSW State Archives Collection is an agency of the New South Wales Government that archives and manages the records of the history of the Government of New South Wales in Australia and is part of Museums of History NSW. Prior to 2022, it was ...

. It began in 2007 with

Australian Research Council The Australian Research Council (ARC) is the primary non-medical research funding agency of the Australian Government, distributing more than in grants each year. The Council was established by the ''Australian Research Council Act 2001'', ...

funding and launched on 5 November 2009. Geographically, the Dictionary of Sydney includes the whole

Sydney basin The Sydney Basin is an Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia, interim Australian bioregion and is both a structural entity and a depositional area, now preserved on the east coast of New South Wales, Australia and with some of its ...

and chronologically spans the years from the earliest human habitation to the present. It also invited historical contributions from disciplines such as archaeology, sociology, literary studies, historical geography and cultural studies. Heurist, developed by the

was the underlying technology for the project. The Dictionary of Sydney won an Energy Australia National Trust Heritage Award for Interpretation and Presentation in April 2010. The site now resides at the State Library of New South Wales on the

Drupal Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide ...

platform. The Dictionary was archived in 2021.

Contributors

Contributions are sourced from hundreds of academics, writers and researchers. Notable contributors include

Keith Vincent Smith Dr Keith Vincent Smith (1939 – November 2022) was an Australian writer, historian and journalist. He has become a notable specialist on early Sydney and Indigenous Australians of the Sydney area, including the lives of the Eora peoples, Bung ...

, with 15 entries, including entries on

Bennelong Woollarawarre Bennelong ( 1764 – 3 January 1813) was a senior man of the Eora, an Aboriginal Australian people of the Port Jackson area, at the time of the first British settlement in Australia. Bennelong served as an interlocutor between ...

and

Pemulwuy Pemulwuy ( /pɛməlwɔɪ/ ''PEM-əl-woy''; 1750 – 2 June 1802) was a Bidjigal warrior of the Dharug, an Aboriginal Australian people from New South Wales. One of the most famous Aboriginal resistance fighters in the colonial era, he is n ...

References

External links

Dictionary of Sydney websiteacademic journal
and blo

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dictionary Of Sydney Internet properties established in 2009 2009 establishments in Australia Australian online encyclopedias Social history of Australia Culture of Sydney Mass media in Sydney