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 Block Field 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 Block Field. 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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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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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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