Professor Melanie Swalwell

Biography

Melanie Swalwell is Professor of Digital Media Heritage in the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University. Melanie’s research focuses on the creation, use, preservation, and legacy of complex digital artefacts such as videogames and media artworks.

Currently, Melanie is leading two Digital Media Heritage and Preservation ARC Linkage projects: “Play It Again: Preserving Australian videogame history of the 1990s” (see www.playitagainproject.com), and “Archiving Australian Media Arts: Towards a best practice method and national collection” (see http://www.aama.net.au). In addition, she is Project Leader for "The Australian Emulation Network: Born Digital Cultural Collections Access", an ARC LIEF awarded to a consortium of universities and GLAM organisations (see https://auseaasi.org/). An ARC Future Fellow from 2014-18, Melanie continues to research "Creative Micro-computing in Australia, 1976-92".

Melanie manages the running of the Digital Heritage Lab at Swinburne, a collection of functioning vintage computer hardware and facilities for the imaging of disks originally set up by Dr Denise de Vries, now directed by Dr Cynde Moya.

Melanie is the author of Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality (MIT Press), as well as many chapters and articles on the histories of digital games. She is the editor of Game History and the Local (Palgrave, 2021), and co-editor of Fans and Videogames: Histories, fandom, archives (with Helen Stuckey and Angela Ndalianis, Routledge, 2017), and The Pleasures of Computer Gaming: Essays on cultural history, theory and aesthetics (with Jason Wilson, McFarland, 2008).