A Stitch in Time: Using Data Embroidery to Tell Australian Convict Stories

The Stitch in Time project extends a traditional timeline visualisation of Australian convict women's lives by creating physical data embroideries drawing from the available historical data of individual women. The timelines visualise the individual life courses of over 13,600 nineteenth century Australian convict women according to the paper trail left behind in the Colonial Archives. In this project we created 18 embroideries of 21 convict women, based on sketches inspired by specific pieces of information in each woman's life. This novel approach illuminates the personal lives of individual subjects, of whom little imagery has survived. By exhibiting the embroideries in the Penitentiary Chapel in Hobart, Tasmania, we hope to arouse interest in the largely forgotten lives of this first coerced generation of European settlers. We use the unusual medium of embroidery on fabric because it is tightly connected to the daily experiences of convict women. By extending traditional data visualisation using this specific form of data physicalisation, data embroidery, we aim to create compelling access points to engage with individual Australian convict stories and therefore make this significant part of Australian history more approachable1.