Last week I took my daughter to Sydney so she could attend a girls-only Minecraft workshop at the Powerhouse Museum (they created some wonderful things). It was a 3½ bus journey each way, so to keep myself occupied I set…
Last week I took my daughter to Sydney so she could attend a girls-only Minecraft workshop at the Powerhouse Museum (they created some wonderful things). It was a 3½ bus journey each way, so to keep myself occupied I set…
I obviously did a lot of talking in 2012, but I also made a few things… The evolution of QueryPic At the start of 2012 QueryPic was a fairly messy Python script that scraped data from the Trove newspaper database…
I’m deeply in love with the collections of the National Archives of Australia. They move me, they inspire me, they make me want to do something. How do I express my love? I’ve written stories about things like atomic bombs,…
On 15 April 1944 the Sydney Morning Herald turned inside out. For more than a hundred years, the front page had been dominated by advertisements, but this changed suddenly in 1944 as the newspaper took on a completely new look.…
[view on Storify] This is a story about a thing I made. I’m still not sure what to call it. Or what it’s really for. But I like it. And I hope other people will too…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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 —…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
