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 August. [...]
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 content. [...]
Amongst the holdings of the National Archives of Australia are some of the most visually arresting documents you’ll see — thousands and thousands of forms from the early decades of the twentieth century, each with a portrait photograph and palm print, each documenting the movements of a non-white resident. Along with many other certificates, regulations, [...]
The trained guinea pigs in the Wragge Labs bunker have been churning out all sorts of stuff in the last few months, and I’m way behind in my attempts to document their activities. So this is a bit of a catch-up post to try and commit a few pertinent details to the collective memory bank [...]
I’ve been doing a fair bit of coding in recent weeks and I thought I’d better write a few details down before I forget about them.
As previously noted, I’ve been gathering together various historical data sets for a project at the National Museum of Australia. One resource that I was keen on including was the [...]
For a project that I’m working on at the National Museum of Australia, I’ve started collecting various sources of date-identified data. Most recently I had a go at extracting historical population data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
The data can all be downloaded as .xls files, but they’re not simple, flat spreadsheets – they’re data [...]
About a month ago I posted a copy of my report Emerging technologies for the provision of access to archives on Scribd. It’s already edging up towards a thousand reads, so I thought it was time I put a link in from here.
The basic message is we need to experiment and find the spaces [...]
Let me be clear. I am not Tim Sherratt the sound engineer. Nor, indeed, am I Timothy Sherratt, author of Saints as Citizens: A Guide to Public Responsibilities for Christians. We are three different people, spread across three continents, locked in a deadly battle for global supremacy via Google search rankings. There can be only [...]
I was doing some research using the National Archives of Australia’s RecordSearch database the other day and became frustrated that there is no way of seeing how many pages are in a digitised file without clicking on the ‘Display digital copy’ link. So I fixed it.
As a userscript it’s hardly worthy of a blog post. [...]
It’s great to see that the National Archives of Australia has released a large swag of data through the new data.australia.gov.au site. In the Commonwealth Agencies zip file you can find xml dumps of all the publicly accessible agency and series data in RecordSearch, as well as item data for series A1. This is the [...]
The ever-informative Twitter alerted me recently to the History Trust of South Australia’s object of the month. It made me think that it would be nice if there was some way of bringing together all those objects, photos and documents featured by our cultural institutions. Some sort of combined RSS feed perhaps?
Something like this…
{“pipe_id”:”d9507f84ba0046394fb34a99de0709bf”,”_btype”:”list”}
Well, yes… [...]
Instead of idly waiting for visitors to stumble over their holdings on some lonely information by-way, archives are starting to push their content out into the bustling metropolis of the social web. They are going where the people are. Photographic collections, in particular, are gaining new lives and new audiences thanks to Flickr.
But that’s only [...]
There’s more 3D goodness for you to enjoy now that the Mapping our Anzacs scrapbook is Cooliris-enabled. If you have Cooliris installed, you’ll notice that the Cooliris icon on your browser toolbar lights up when you visit the site. Just click on the icon to browse all the photos posted to the scrapbook on [...]
So I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if the Australian Dictionary of Biography’s ‘born on this day‘ feature could be made available as an RSS feed. Every morning you’d get a new list of biographies delivered direct to your feed reader. And so…
[sounds of xpath wrangling and PHP coding]
here it is.
It’s pretty simple – [...]
Mapping our Anzacs, in case you don’t know, provides a Google map interface to the 375,000+ WWI service records held by the National Archives of Australia. Amongst other other things, you can add scrapbook posts to individual entries and create tributes. It’s meant to encourage exploration, so go on… explore!
If you’ll do, you’ll notice that [...]
With a bit of time to play over Christmas I had a go at applying some of the techniques described at ProgrammingHistorian to the ADB Online. I thought it might be interesting to create some word clouds, both for what they could reveal about the content of the ADB, and to see what they had [...]
If you haven’t played with Wordle yet, you should. Feed it your latest article, your thesis, your blog and see what emerges from the cloud.
Some months ago I wordled the Australian Constitution (as you do). Wordle’s expert legal analysis offers a fairly positive assessment of our federal system, suggesting that Commonwealth and state powers are [...]
The new version of my Greasemonkey userscript, RecordSearch Image Tools, gives RecordSearch’s digital image pages a rather new look. My previous version had done away with the tired ol ‘lemon-chiffon’ background colour, but I decided it was time to get a bit more adventurous, so I blitzed the old design and rebuilt the page from [...]
BREAKING NEWS (2.00pm, Monday, 8 December): RecordSearch seems to be back on the old subdomain, so now the userscript fix is not working! To be safe, I’ve updated the userscript again so that it will work on both the old and new subdomains. I’ll do the same with the Zotero translator, though for the time [...]
From Wallal, in Australia’s far north-west, to Goondiwindi, near the New South Wales-Queensland border, local and international scientists watched the sun and waited.
A total solar eclipse was due on 21 September 1922. An eclipse always held scientific interest, but this one offered the chance to confirm one of the most revolutionary theories in science. Albert [...]
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