As the end of the year approaches it’s time to take stock with my annual talking/making summary. This was a year of change. In March, I started combining my work at Trove with a part-time appointment at the University of Canberra. I think there’s a great need for joint appointments between the cultural sector and academia, but juggling two part-time jobs has been a struggle. As much as I love Trove, I’m finishing up at the National Library of Australia at Christmas time and heading into 2016 looking for new challenges!
2015 was a big year for talking, with DH2015 an obvious highlight.
- 3 February — ‘Seams & edges: Dreams of aggregation, access and discovery in a broken world’, ALIA Online, Sydney
- 13 February — ‘Myths, mega-projects, and making’, joint keynote at EuropeanaTech 2015, Paris (via video)
- 30 March, ‘The many meanings of Trove’ (slides), 14th Australasian Congress on Genealogy and Heraldry, Canberra
- 10 April — ‘Stories for machines, data for humans’, New Factual Storytelling Symposium, University of Canberra, Canberra
- 15 April — Presentation at ‘Your Library in 2020’, Deakin University, Melbourne
- 15 May — ‘Significance at scale: Understanding the value of 150 million newspaper articles’ (slides), (In)significance, University of Canberra
- 4 June — Part of a panel discussing copyright, State Library of NSW, Sydney
- 29 June — Speedo on my LODBook project (video), LODLAM Summit, Sydney
- 3 July — ‘Unremembering the forgotten’, keynote at DH2015, Parramatta
- 13 August — ‘Trove and beyond’ (slides), Griffith University, Brisbane
- 7 September — ‘#Borderfarce, building, and a hackers’ reward’, National Scholarly Communications Forum, Canberra
- 13 October — ‘The perfect face’, NDF2015, Wellington
- 21 October — ‘Towards a manifesto for tactical DH infrastructure’, University of Canterbury, Christchurch
- 28 October — ‘Digital disruptions’ (slides), workshop at University of Otago, Dunedin
- 5 November — Introduced the closing panel on ‘Perspective and scale’, Recasting the Question: Digital Approaches to Art History, University of Sydney
- 5 December — ‘The digital revolution and the practice of history’ (slides), keynote at History Teachers’ Day, Macquarie University, Sydney
It’s been a bit of a frustrating year on the making front — just didn’t seem to have the time or energy to pursue the projects I was interested in. But I did have a bit of fun with faces and ASIO files…
- Radio National data — harvesting current affairs programs from Trove
- Closed Access — some experiments in the meaning of ‘access’ through the National Archives of Australia’s RecordSearch database
- The Vintage Face Depot (background on Storify)
- Face API — a simple API to a collection of faces extracted from Trove newspapers
- Faces dataset — faces from Trove in an easily downloadable form (via Figshare)
- The People Inside (Trove edition) — userscript to add faces to Trove newspaper results (I also updated the RecordSearch edition)
- Have you got what it takes to protect Australia’s secrets?
- ASIO files — harvesting images and data from ASIO files held by the National Archives of Australia
- Trove Lists Exhibition — turning Trove lists into simple exhibitions
There’s various other updates and unfinished stuff on GitHub. I hope to expand on a few of these projects in the new year.
I’ll still be at the University of Canberra, working on developing some new teaching possibilities around digital cultural heritage. Get in touch if you’re interested in pursuing postgraduate research!
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