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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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… [...]
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 [...]
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 a [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
