There seems to be a lot of topic modelling going on at the moment. Any why not? Projects like Mining the Dispatch are demonstrating the possibilities. Tools like Mallet are making it easy. And generous DHers like Ted Underwood and Scott Weingart are doing a great job explaining what it is and how it works. [...]
Earlier this week it was announced that the Mosman Library had been awarded a Library Development Grant for an innovative project that aims to document stories and artefacts relating to the First World War. I’m very excited to be part of it. As well as working with the local community in the creation of a new resource, [...]
Yes, I have a suit. On 8 May at the National Library of Australia I gave my suit an outing as I delivered my Harold White Fellowship presentation. Thanks to everyone who came along. If you missed it or want to relive the fun, the NLA has made a podcast available. My slides are also [...]
It seems a bit late to be introducing the newest version of QueryPic. Folks are already using it to explore the contents of digitised newspapers made available through Trove and Papers Past. Some, like the National Library of New Zealand, Andrew S. Bowman and the Carnamah Historical Society are already blogging about it. But I suppose [...]
You may have noticed I have a bit on an interest in exploring ways of using digitised historical newspapers. In the last year or so I’ve spent a lot of time scraping, mining, processing and visualising content from the Trove collection of digitised Australian newspapers. But what about other countries? Recently I was invited to a digital [...]
In February I made a quick dash to Melbourne to talk at VALA2012. The paper I originally submitted, ‘Mining the treasures of Trove: New approaches and new tools’, provided a general introduction to the use of digitised historical newspapers and the possibilities of digital history. You can download the pdf from the VALA2012 proceedings, or view [...]
By my own criteria I’ve already failed… I started this series of posts with the intention of documenting the process of finding and extracting editorials as I was actually doing the work. But here I am about to describe some work I finished a few weeks back. Oh well… In my previous instalments (here and [...]
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 [...]
