2014 — the making and the talking

This my now traditional ‘what I done this year’ post, which, if nothing else, makes me check that my various experiments are still alive. It’s been a challenging year trying to balance my work as Trove Manager with my broader passions and responsibilities as a member of the digital humanities community. So yeah. My personal highlights included heading to Japan to give a keynote at the annual conference of the Japanese Association of Digital Humanities, building Eyes on the past, and resurrecting THATCamp Canberra.

2015 is shaping up as both exciting and scary. On the scary front there’s the whole giving a keynote to hundreds of the world’s leading digital humanities scholars at DH2015 thing (cue imposter syndrome). There’ll also be the launch of Copyfight from NewSouth Publishing, which includes contributions from me and some really-real writers. I’m looking forward to squeezing in some more work on Invisible Australians and a few other research projects. Stay tuned.

The making

Inserting usual disclaimer here that this is not what I get paid to do as Trove Manager. These are projects and experiments I undertake in my own time, for my own reasons, at the cost of my own sanity. So all the problems and mistakes are also mine.

• Some Python code for migrating Trove tags and lists to Zotero collections. More details…
• @TroveBot — a sibling for @TroveNewsBot, tweeting goodness from all the non-newspapery bits of Trove. Read the birth notice…
• Using the Trove API to enrich some WWI data from the State Library of South Australia.
• A new version of the Tung Wah Newspaper Index — an English-language index of two Chinese-language newspapers – the Tung Wah News 東華新報 (1898–1902) and the later Tung Wah Times 東華報 (1902–1936) – published in Sydney, Australia.  More details…
• Some experimenting with facial detection and WWI newspaper articles.
• A prototype for finding Trove newspapers near a given location. More details…
• Trove is… — a dashboard-y thing to give a current snapshot of Trove’s contents. More details…
• A simple search interface to help you find the Radio National content in Trove. More details…
• In a word…  — explore the currents of Australian affairs, 2003–2013. More details…
• Eyes on the past — an experimental interface to explore Trove’s newspapers through faces. Yep, faces (and eyes). Creepy or beautiful — what do you think? The story…
• Trove Traces — exploring Trove newspaper links on the wild, wild web.
• @OperationBot — protecting Australia from meaning. Also available in web app flavour…
• Making lots of graphs in Plotly. More details…
• Faces from Series J2483 — a new demo on an old theme, prepared for my JADH keynote.
• A webapp for Troveia — create your own Trove trivia competitions with this code
• I also solved the problems I was having with RecordSearch to get my WWI Records Finder working properly again. Yay!

The talking

• The future of Trove, State Library of WA, 18 March 2014.
• Trove — it’s bigger on the inside…, GovHack Data Jam, 3 June 2014. Bonus video edition at no extra cost!
• Life on the outside: Collections, contexts and the wild, wild web, keynote at the Japanese Association of Digital Humanities, 20 September 2014. Now available on Medium for your viewing pleasure!
• Introduction to Trove, Cultural Heritage and New Media Workshop, Curtin University, 25 September 2014.
• Digitised newspapers and the varieties of value, Europeana Newspapers workshop, British Library, 29 September 2014.
• Presentations on the future of Trove for AustLII, the ACT branch of the Australian Law Librarians Association, and the ANU Library.
• Guest lectures on digital humanities and Trove for undergraduate and graduate courses at ANU.

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