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 [...]
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Out of the cube
Emerging technologies and the need to experiment
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 [...]
I link therefore I am
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 [...]
Doing it yourself
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. [...]
Some archives hacking
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 [...]
Playing with pipes
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… [...]
Harvesting context #1: Flickr comments
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 [...]
Cooliris-enabled scrapbook
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 [...]
ADB DIY RSS
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 – [...]
MoA buttons galore
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 [...]
Cloudy biographies and portrait walls
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 [...]
A wordled Constitution
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 [...]
Archives in 3D
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 [...]
RecordSearch tools broken!?
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 [...]
Looking at the sun
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 [...]
Civilisation versus the giant, winged lizards
‘Modern man is a forest butcher’, warned the pioneering science journalist Hugh McKay in 1923. ‘He is also an oil-spendthrift and a coal waster’, McKay continued, ‘recklessly spending his capital of fuel… with never a thought of the tomorrow when he will stand shivering and motionless in the middle of a coal-less, oil-less, treeless, steel-less [...]
Treasures
Australia is blessed, it seems, with a frightening abundance of treasures. A quick survey of our cultural institutions reveals an escalating ‘treasures race’, as libraries, museums, and archives bombard the public with accounts of their rarest, most beautiful, and most interesting items. The State Library of Victoria, for example, has published a lavish description of [...]
Remembering Lawrence Hargrave
In 1962 William Hudson Shaw, a Qantas executive, knocked at the door of a cottage in the seaside village of Walmer, Kent. Shaw was in the grip of an obsession – a ‘labour of love’ to document the ‘true story’ of Australian aeronautical pioneer Lawrence Hargrave.[1] This quest had brought Shaw to the home [...]
Frontiers of the future
The glow of his campfire framed a simple tableau of pioneer life. Across this ‘untenanted land’, Edwin Brady mused, ‘little companies’, such as his own, sat by their ‘solitary fires’. ‘They smoked pipes and talked, or watched the coals reflectively’. Around them, the ‘shadowy outlines’ of the bush merged into the dark northern night, and [...]
Human elements
‘I say emphatically that the climate has changed’, Henry Hodgson told the Argus in 1928. The experience of seventy-eight years brooked no denial, summers were milder, and thunderstorms were fewer. ‘It is no use telling me that weather bureau statistics do not bear this out’, he added defiantly. ‘You can do anything with statistics, but [...]
