2011 was a busy year. It’s hard to believe that it was only February when I first posted about my experiments mining the contents of the Trove newspaper database. Since then I’ve developed a set of digital tools, organised THATCamp Canberra, given a series of presentations on the possibilities of digital history, pushed ahead with [...]
Videos from NDF2011 are now available online. Here’s the movie version of my talk It’s all about the stuff. I seem to spend a lot of time in the shadows…
Back when I was looking at ‘When did the Great War become the First World War?‘ I promised a detailed post on how I constructed the graphs. But of course I got distracted. Then I started adding new features to the script and redesigning the graphs, so… Anyway, the result is a rather neat little [...]
As I explained in the first of this series, I’m documenting my efforts to extract every editorial published in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1913 from the Trove newspaper database. It’s an experiment both in text mining and historical writing — an attempt to put the method up front. While I didn’t think there was anything [...]
This is the full version of a paper I presented at the National Digital Forum, 30 November 2011. In 1901, one of the first acts of the Commonwealth of Australia was to create a system of exclusion and control designed to keep the newly-formed nation ‘white’. But White Australia was always a myth. As well [...]
In their chapter in Writing History in the Digital Age, Trevor Owens and Fred Gibbs encourage historians to write about the ways they work with data — to document their methods, their working assumptions, their dead ends and their discoveries. It’s an important argument and one that makes me wonder again about forms of publication [...]
I have problems with the idea of infrastructure, particularly that of the e-research variety. It seems like we always end up talking about huge amounts of money and multi-institutional partnerships. It just doesn’t seem like a great model for innovation. As I’ve previously argued, I’d like to see something more like the funding schemes offered [...]
Entering the web of data [view the presentation...] [view the triples...] Keynote delivered at the annual conference of the Australia and New Zealand Society of Indexers, 14 September 2011. This is me. Today, Wednesday, 14 September 2011, I’m honoured to be able to join you here in the luxurious surrounds of the Brighton Savoy Hotel [...]
In many of the presentations I’ve given in recent times I’ve managed to include a question raised by Tim Hitchcock in his chapter in The Virtual Representation of the Past. Tim asks: What changes when we examine the world through the collected fragments of knowledge that we can recover about a single person, reorganised as [...]
I’m interested in time — in the way we imagine, manipulate, experience and describe time, particularly in the service of ideas such as ‘progress’. This was one of the themes of Atomic Wonderland, but beyond constructing a few case studies it’s not all that easy to study. Or at least it wasn’t. Now projects such [...]
I tell the full story of the newspaper’s campaign in Inigo Jones: The Weather Prophet. but I’ve always wanted to do something more with the letters. Inspiration finally arrived this year when a conference on rural media was organised to mark the The Land‘s centenary. I decided to create a little exhibition using the letters [...]
Here’s the slides from the talk I gave recently in the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia. Thanks to everyone who came and to the Scholars’ Lab for their hospitality. A podcast version is now available. View on SlideShare
One of the advantages of building something yourself is that if you’re not happy with it you can tweak, change, modify and adapt until you are. But one of the disadvantages is that sometimes you get so caught up in all the tweaking, changing and adapting that you overlook a much simpler solution. So I [...]
I’m currently working on a html version of this with added links and content, but in the meantime… Prologue Canberra was in the grip of a heatwave — the longest in its recorded history. After two weeks of hot weather, the temperature topped the century once more, as 800 visitors swarmed into town for the [...]
Some time ago a well-meaning optometrist told me I had the eyes of a 60 year-old. I lay the blame for this premature ocular degeneration upon the many tiring hours I spent squinting at the screens of dodgy microfilm readers. Newspapers were a major source of my PhD research, and back then that meant learning [...]
I seem to have been repeating myself a lot lately. Bethany Nowviskie’s recent visit to our shores prompted much interesting discussion about the possibility of establishing a local digital humanities association. Not for the first time I expressed my hope that any such association would actively involve those of us who eke out an intellectual [...]
In March 1997, a replica of the HMB Endeavour arrived in the UK from Australia. Aboard was a hand-crafted Cabinet of Curiosities. The Cabinet was, I wrote at the time, ‘intended to evoke a sense of mystery. What is in the cabinet? What is its message?’ Some thirteen years later a further question remains unanswered [...]
Presented at the Life of Information Symposium, 24 September 2010. Slides are available on Slideshare. This palm print belongs to a 12-year-old boy called Charlie Allen. Charlie was born in Sydney in 1896. His mother was Frances Allen (sometime sweet shop owner and brothel keeper), his father Charlie Gum (a buyer for Wing On company). [...]
One of the things that’s keeping me busy at the moment is THATCamp Canberra. Yes, I got sick of missing out on all the THATCamp fun happening elsewhere and decided we should have our own. THATCamp Canberra is a user-generated unconference on the digital humanities. It’ll be held at the University of Canberra on 28–29 [...]
Some of you may have noticed that my Hacking a research project post featured a file from the National Archives of Australia embedded as a Cooliris widget. Huh? To jog your memory, here it is again: No, it’s not just an image, it’s a little 3D wall. You can pan and zoom to your heart’s [...]
