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 as the Indigenous population, there were already many thousands of people classified as ‘non-white‘ living in Australia — most were Chinese, but there were also Japanese, Indians, Syrians and Indonesians.

Here are some of them…

The real face of White Australia

The administration of what became known as the White Australia Policy created a huge volume of records, much of which is still preserved within the National Archives of Australia. These photographs are attached to certificates that non-white residents needed to get back into the country if they decided to travel overseas. There are thousands upon thousands of these certificates in the Archives. Thousands of certificates representing thousands of lives — all monitored and controlled.

But is is too easy to see these people as the powerless victims of a repressive system. There were many acts of resistance. Some argued against the need to be identified ‘just like a criminal’. Others exercised control over their representation, submitting formal studio portraits instead of mug shots.

Most commonly and most powerfully, people resisted the policy simply by going ahead and living rich and productive lives.

My partner, Kate Bagnall, is helping to rewrite Australian-Chinese history by overthrowing the stereotype of the culturally isolated Chinese man living a lonely, meagre existence surrounded by gambling and opium dens. By mining the available records, by reading against the grain of contemporary reports and by working with family historians, Kate is documenting their intimate lives — their wives, their lovers, their families and descendants — the sorts of relationships that sent a shudder through the edifice of White Australia. Power can be reclaimed in many subtle and subversive ways.

‘The real face of White Australia’ is an experiment. It uses facial detection to technology to find and extract the photographs from digital copies of the original certificates made available through the National Archives of Australia’s collection database. The photographs you see here come from just one series, ST84/1. There’s no API to the collection so I reverse-engineered the web interface to create a script that would harvest the item metadata and download copies of all the digitised images. There are 2,756 files in this series. On the day I harvested the metadata, 347 of those files had been digitised, comprising 12,502 images. It took a few hours, but I just ran my script and soon I had a copy of all of this in my local database.

Then came the exciting part. Using a facial detection script I found through Google and an open source computer vision library, I started experimenting with ways of extracting the photos. After a few tweaks I had something that worked pretty well, so I pointed my aging laptop at the 12,502 images and watched anxiously as the CPU temperature rose and rose. It took a few emergency cooling measures, but the laptop survived and I had a folder containing 11,170 cropped images. About a third of these weren’t actually faces, but it was easy to manually remove the false positives, leaving 7,247 photos.

These photos. These people.

With my database fully primed and loaded it was just a matter of creating a simple web interface using Django for the backend and Isotope (a jQuery plugin) at the front. Both are open source projects. All together, from idea to interface, it took a bit more than a weekend to create, and most of that was waiting for the harvesting and facial detection scripts to complete. It would be silly to say it was easy, but I would say that it wasn’t hard.

What we ended up with was a new way of seeing and understanding the records — not as the remnants of bureaucratic processes, but as windows onto the lives of people. All the faces are linked to copies of the original certificates and back to the collection database of the National Archives. So this is also a finding aid. A finding aid that brings the people to the front.

According to Margaret Hedstrom the archival interface ‘is a site where power is negotiated and exercised’. Whether in a reading room or online, finding aids or collection databases are ‘neither neutral nor transparent’, but the product of ‘conscious design decisions’. We would like to think that this interface gives some power back to the people within the records. Their photographs challenge us to do something, to think something, to feel something. We cannot escape their discomfiting gaze.

But this interface represents another subtle shift in power. We could create it without any explicit assistance or involvement by the National Archives itself. Simply by putting part of the collection online, they provided us with the opportunity to develop a resource that both extends and critiques the existing collection database. Interfaces to cultural heritage collections are no longer controlled solely by cultural heritage institutions.

It’s these two aspects of the power of interfaces that I want to focus on today.

There are a growing number of examples where the records created by repressive or discriminatory regimes have, in Eric Ketelaar’s words, ‘become instruments of empowerment and liberation, salvation and freedom’. Nazi records of assets confiscated during the Holocaust have been used to inform processes of restitution and reparation. Government records have helped members of Australia’s Stolen Generations trace family members. Descendants of inmates incarcerated by American colonial authorities in what was the world’s largest leprosy colony in the Philippines, have embraced the administrative record as an affirmation of their own heritage and survival. Records can find new meanings. Power can be reclaimed.

Technology can help. Tim Hitchcock has described how something as simple as keyword searching can turn archives on their heads. Recordkeeping systems tend to reflect the structures and power relations of the organisations that create them. The ‘hierarchical and institutional nature of most archives’, Hitchcock argues, ‘contains an ideological component which is sucked in with every dust-filled breath’. But digitisation and keyword searching free us from having to follow the well-worn paths of institutional power. We can find people and follow their lives against the flow of bureaucratic convenience. We can gain a wholly new perspective on the workings of society. ‘What changes’, Hitchcock asks, ‘when we examine the world through the collected fragments of knowledge that we can recover about a single person, reorganised as a biographical narrative, rather than as part of an archival system?’

Projects such as Unknown no longer may help us answer that question.

Unknown no longer

It’s aiming to extract the names and biographical details of slaves from the 8 million manuscript documents held by the Virginia Historical Society. The documents include court records, receipts, wills and inventories. Here is a page from the ‘Inventory of Negroes at Berry Plain Plantation, King George County, Virginia’ for 1855, listing names, occupations and valuations.

Tim Hitchcock is one of the directors of London Lives a project that similarly seeks to find the people in 240,000 manuscript pages documenting the lives of plebeian Londoners in the 17th century.

London Lives

More than three million names have already been extracted from the records of courts, workhouses, hospitals and other institutions. Work is continuing to link these names together, to merge these various shards of identity and piece together the experiences of London’s poorest inhabitants.

Remember me from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum is working with photographs taken by relief agencies in the aftermath of World War Two. The photographs are of displaced children who survived the Holocaust but were separated from families. What happened to them? The project is seeking public help to identify and trace the children.

Remember me

These are all projects about finding people. Finding the oppressed, the vulnerable, the displaced, the marginalized and the poor and giving them their place in history. This is what Kate and I hope to do with Invisible Australians, the broader project of which our faces experiment is part.

Invisible Australians

‘Invisible Australians’ aims to extract more than just photographs. We want to record and aggregate the biographical data contained within the records of the White Australia Policy — to extract the data and rebuild identities.

But we want to do more, we want to link these identities up with with other records, with the research of family and local historians, with cemetery registers and family trees, with newspaper articles and databases we don’t even know about yet. We want to find people, families and communities.

It’s ridiculously ambitious and totally unfunded. But it is possible.

The most exciting part of online technology is the power it gives to people to pursue their passions. As with the faces, we don’t need the help of the National Archives. We need the records to be digitized, but that’s happening anyway and we can afford to be patient. Most of the tools we need already exist, and are free. In the past 12 months, for example, there have been a number of open source tools released for crowd-sourced transcription of manuscript records.

People with passions, people with dreams, people who are just annoyed and impatient, don’t have to wait for cultural institutions to create exactly what they need. They can take what’s on offer and change it.

Interfaces can be modified. It is amazingly easy to write a script that will change the way a web page looks and behaves in your browser. I was frustrated by the standard interface to digitized files in the National Archives of Australia’s Recordsearch database — so I changed it.

Before and after

Not only did make it look a bit nicer, I added new functions. My script lets you print a whole file or a range of pages and display the entire contents of the file on a pretty cool 3d wall.

I’ve shared this script, and a few other Recordsearch enhancements. Anyone can install them with a click and use them.

Wragge Labs Emporium

Interfaces are sites of power and we can claim some of that power for ourselves. Online technologies not only free us from the having to brave the physical intimidation of the reading room, they free us up to engage with the records in new ways. The archivist-on-duty would probably not be pleased if I pulled out some scissors and started snipping photos out of certificates. Or if I pulled a file apart and pasted it’s contents on the wall. But online we are free to experiment.

The power of cultural heritage organisations is perhaps expressed most forcefully in their ability to control the arrangement and description of their collections. ‘Every representation, every model of description, is biased’, note Verne Harris and Wendy Duff, ‘because it reflects a particular world-view and is constructed to meet specific purposes’. Archives, libraries and museums are already starting to share this power, by allowing tagging, or seeking public assistance with description through crowd sourcing projects. But most of the these activities still happen within spaces created and curated by the institutions themselves. Our cathedrals of culture might be opening their doors and inviting the public to participate in their ceremonies, but that doesn’t make them bazaars. The architecture stills speaks of authority.

In any case, people already have a space where they can explore and enrich collections — it’s called the internet.

It would be great to see cultural institutions doing more to watch, understand and support what people are doing with collections in their own spaces — following them as they pursue their passions, rather than thinking of ways to motivate them.

A quick example… You might have heard of Zotero, it’s an open source project that lets you capture, annotate and organize your research materials.

Zotero

One cool thing about Zotero is that you can build and contribute little screen scrapers, called translators, that let Zotero extract structured data from any old collection database. You might not be surprised to learn that I’ve created a translator for Recordsearch. Another cool thing about Zotero is that you can share the stuff that you collect in public groups.

Invisible Australians Zotero group

Put those two cool things together and what do you have? Well to me they spell out user generated finding aids — parallel collection databases created by researchers simply pursuing their own passions.

Linked Open Data greatly increases opportunities for collection description to leak into the wider web. If objects and documents are identified with a unique URL, then anyone can can make and publish statements about them in machine-readable form. These statements can then be aggregated and explored. Initiatives such as the Open Annotation Collaboration will hasten the development of these shared descriptive and interpretative layers around our cultural collections.

And of course all this descriptive and interpretative work can be harvested back to enhance existing collection databases. We could start doing it now — though I will spare you today my rant about the possibilities of mining footnotes.

As well as exploring the possibilities of user-generated content, cultural institutions are starting to open up their collection data for re-use. APIs are great (though Linked Open Data is better), and New Zealand is lucky to have an organisation like DigitalNZ which just gets it. People can and will make cool things with your stuff.

But again, we don’t have to wait for everything to be delivered in a convenient, machine-readable form. If it’s on the web anybody can scrape, harvest and experiment.

You probably all know about the National Library of Australia’s newspaper digitisation project — it’s building a magnificent resource. But I wanted to do more than just find articles. I wanted to explore and analyze their content on a large scale. So I built a screen scraper to extract structured data from search results, and then used the scraper to  power a series of tools. I have a harvester that lets you download an entire results set — hundreds or thousands of articles — with metadata neatly packaged for further analysis.

Harvester

Or what about a script that graphs the occurrence of search terms over time, and allows you to ask questions like When did the Great War become the First World War?.

When did the Great War become the First World War?

In the end I got a bit carried away and built my own public API to the Trove newspaper database.

Unofficial Trove newspapers API

I think it’s important to note that the tools I developed were guided by the types of questions I wanted to ask. While we should welcome APIs and celebrate their possibilities, we should also remain critical. APIs are interfaces, they too embed power relations. Every API has an argument. What questions do they let us ask? What questions do they prevent us from asking?

Even as we move from the age of lumbering, slow-witted data silos into the rapidly-evolving realms of Linked Open Data, we have to constantly question the models we make of the world. Ontologies and vocabularies are culturally determined and historically specific. Yes, they too are interfaces, complete with their own distributions of power and authority. But we can revisit and change them. And we can relate our new models to our old models, capturing complex, long-term shifts in the way we think about the world. That’s incredibly exciting.

All of this hacking, harvesting, questioning, enriching and meaning-making makes me think about the possibilities of grassroots leadership. Online technologies enable people to take cultural institutions into unexpected realms. They can build their own interfaces, ask their own questions, determine their own needs — they can point the way instead of simply waiting to be served.

You might wonder what the National Library of Australia thinks of my various scrapers and harvesters. I can’t speak for them, but I can say that they’ve awarded me a fellowship to explore further the possibilities of text-mining in their newspaper database.

The idea of grassroots leadership brings me back to the title of this talk — ‘It’s all about the stuff’. It seems to me that we tend to model the interactions between cultural institutions and the public as transactions. The public are ‘clients’, ‘patrons’, ‘users’ or ‘visitors’. But the sorts of things I’ve been talking about today give us a chance to put the collections themselves squarely at the centre of our thoughts and actions. Instead of concentrating on the relationship between the institution and the public, we can can focus on the relationship we both have with the collections.

It’s all about the stuff.

It’s all about the respect and responsibility we both have for our collections.

It’s all about the respect and responsibility we both have for people like this.

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 a biographical narrative, rather than as part of an archival system?

The idea of turning archival systems on their head to expose the people rather than the bureaucracy is what motivates Kate Bagnall and I in our attempts to make the Invisible Australians project into a reality.

Invisible Australians aims to liberate the lives of those who suffered under the restrictions of the White Australia Policy from the rich archival holdings of the National Archives of Australia and elsewhere.

We always knew that the portrait photographs, included on a range of government documents, would provide a compelling perspective on these lives, but we weren’t quite sure how we were going to extract them. Up until last weekend, I’d assumed that we’d develop a crowdsourcing tool that contributors would use to mark-up the photos.

Now I’m not so sure.

In the space of a couple of days I’ve extracted over 7,000 photographs and built an application to browse them — here is the real face of White Australia…

How did I do it? Paul Hagon, at the National Library of Australia, gave a presentation last year in which he explored the possibilities of facial detection in developing access to photographic collections. The idea lodged in my brain somewhere and a few days ago I started to poke around looking to see how practical it might be for Invisible Australians.

It didn’t take long to find a python script that used the OpenCV library to detect faces in photographs. I tried the script on a few of the NAA documents and was impressed — there were a few false positives, but the faces were being found!

So then the excitement kicked in. I modified the script so that instead of just finding the coordinates of faces it would enlarge the selected area by 50px on each side and then crop the image. This did a great job of extracting the portraits. I tweaked a few of the settings as well to try and reduce the number of false positives. Eventually, I developed a two-pass system that repeated the detection process after the image had been cropped and it’s contrast adjusted. This seemed to weed out a few more errors. You can find the code on GitHub.

Once the script was working I had to assemble the documents. I already had a basic harvester that would retrieve both the file metadata and digitised images for any series in the NAA database. Acting on Kate’s advice, I pointed it at series ST84/1 and downloaded 12,502 page images.

All I then had to do was loop the facial detection script over the images. Simple! The only problem was that my 3-year-old laptop wasn’t quite up to the task. As it’s CPU temperature rose and rose, I was forced to employ a special high-tech cooling system.

Keeping my laptop alive...

But after running for several hours, my faithful old laptop finally worked it’s way through all the documents. The result was a directory full of 11,170 cropped images.

The results

There were still quite a lot of false positives and so I simply worked my way through the files, manually deleting the errors. I ended up with 7,247 photos of people. That’s a strike rate of nearly 65% which seems pretty good. The classifier, which does the actual facial detection, was probably trained on conventional photographs rather than on the mixed-format documents I was feeding it.

Then it was just a matter of building a web app to display the portraits. I used Django for the backend work of managing the metadata and delivering the content, while the interface was built using a combination or Isotope, Infinite Scroll and FancyBox.

It’s important to note that the portraits provide a way of exploring the records themselves. If you click on a face you see a copy of the document from which the photo was extracted. A link is provided to examine the full context of the image in RecordSearch. This is not just an exhibition, it’s a finding aid.

What next? There are many more of these documents to be harvested and processed (and many more still yet to be digitised). I will be adding more series as I can (though I might have to wait until I can afford a new computer!). I’d also like to explore the possibilities of facial or object detection a bit more. Could I train my own classifier? Could I detect handprints, or even classify the type of form?

In the meantime, I think our experimental browser helps us to understand why the Invisible Australians project is so important — you look at their faces and you simply want to know more. Who are they? What were their lives like?

UPDATE: For more on the photos and the issues they raise, see Kate Bagnall’s posts over at the Tiger’s Mouth.

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).

Charlie was raised by his mother, but in 1909, at the age of 13, he was taken to China by his father.

His father returned to Sydney, leaving Charlie in China. He lived with relatives in the town of Shekki (inland from Hong Kong) for 6 years.

Charlie was homesick, but had no means of getting back to Australia. His mother attempted to enlist government help but to no avail. Charlie finally returned in 1915.

The following year he enlisted in First AIF (well actually he enlisted three times, and was discharged as medically unfit each time).

Charlie married in Sydney in 1917 and had two daughters soon after. He returned to China in 1922 for 7 months.

Charlie Allen died in 1938 as the result of an industrial accident. He was 41.

How do we know all this about Charlie Allen?

We know this because there are fragments of Charlie’s life scattered throughout the holdings of the National Archives of Australia.

The CEDT from 1909 when he left Australia with his father:

NAA: ST84/1, 1909/22/41-50

NAA: A1, 1911/13854

NAA: B2455, ALLEN C A

NAA: SP42/1, C1922/4449

Charlie’s father was Chinese, he was therefore categorised as a ‘half-caste’, as someone who was not white, and fell under the restrictions imposed by the White Australia Policy.

The certificate from 1909 granted Charlie an exemption to the Dictation Test. Without it, he may not have been allowed back into the country.

Every time one of many thousands of non-Europeans resident in Australia sought to travel overseas and return home again they needed one of these certificates.

We’re all of course familiar with the general outlines of the White Australia Policy, and the way it underpinned conceptions of Australia as a nation in the first half of the 20th century.

But what we sometimes forget is that it was also a massive bureaucratic exercise.

Forms and certificates were printed, issued, used and filed. Regulations were modified, guidelines were distributed and administering officers were managed and advised. Individual cases were reviewed, policy was changed and new forms and certificates were printed, issued, used and filed…

For example, between 1901 and 1911, 400 circulars were issued to port officers about immigration restriction. The confidential manual on immigration restriction grew from one page in 1902 to more than 200 in 1912.

Much of this system is now preserved in the National Archives.

For the years between 1902 and 1948 there remain:

• More than 50,000 CEDTs
• 90 shelf metres of records
• 15,000 case files

And within those many thousands of files are the scattered fragments of lives such as Charlie’s — lives that were controlled, monitored and documented in a vain attempt to make Australia ‘white’.

We’ve already seen today some wonderful examples of how these fragments, these slivers of existence, can be found, extracted, aggregated and displayed. But I think it’s worth considering for a moment what happens when we do this.

The historian Tim Hitchcock, behind projects such as the Old Bailey Online and London Lives, has reflected on the impact of digitisation on our access to archives. Archives, he notes, tend to reflect the assumptions and practices of the institutions that created them.

But by providing new ways into these records systems, technology can undermine the power relations that persist within their structures.

‘What changes’, asks Tim Hitchcock, ‘when we examine the world through the collected fragments of knowledge that we can recover about a single person, reorganised as a biographical narrative, rather than as part of an archival system?’

I don’t know, but I think we should find out, don’t you?

**********

I hope you’ve all collected a mini card. These themselves provide a little glimpse at the real face of White Australia and I’d invite you all to head over to the National Archives website, do battle with the monster that is RecordSearch, and look up the file references that are on each card.

The cards are part of a project that Kate Bagnall and I are trying to develop — Invisible Australians.

I should note too that the cards, and most of the examples I’m showing you here today are the product of Kate’s long and detailed research into Chinese-Australian families. In modern project management parlance, Kate is the domain expert, while I am merely the technical resource.

If we look again at one of the CEDTs, we can see that there’s a lot of useful structured data:

• name
• place of birth
• age
• height
• destination
• date of departure
• name of ship

Invisible Australians has the modest aim of extracting this data from the 50,000+ forms in the National Archives. But of course that’s just the start, because each person might have used a number of certificates — so then it’s a matter of matching these identities.

http://invisibleaustralians.org

And then there are a range of other related forms, not to mention case files, alien registration documents, naturalisation applications…

Obviously we can’t do it alone. We’ll be creating a crowdsourcing tool to extract and link the data.

It’s ridiculously ambitious, totally unfunded and is likely to take over our lives.

Is it worth it?

Imagine being able to navigate the network of lives, families and relationships. To follow their journeys, to share their tragedies, to celebrate their small victories against a repressive system.

Imagine being able to watch them age.

Is it worth it? We think so.

**********

For Tim Hitchcock technology opens up the possibility of writing a new history from below, exploring how the poor, the marginalised and the powerless navigated the institutions of the modern state. But it’s not just about search engines and databases. He talks about making ‘best use of the technology of emotions and representation — how you use words and pictures and a story to impact, not just on what people think, but what they see in their mind’s eye’.

In this project, the photos matter. I hope the irony in our project title is obvious.

This is the real face of White Australia.

The photos remind us that the project is not just about shifting data around — these are lives, these are people.

But this brings its own challenge, for if we are seeking to liberate these lives from the fragmentation and obscurity of bureaucratic systems then we should be asking what are we liberating them into?

A database?

This is not just an exercise in data creation and management. We also have to think carefully and creatively about issues of representation, access and discovery.

We have to give these lives back their freedom to associate, to have relationships, to make connections.

We need to embed these lives in a variety of contexts and combinations. To make room for serendipity, celebration, sadness, and yes, even play.

We need to bring these lives into a rich and ongoing conversation with the world.

But how?

**********

I’ve been working on a little experiment for the National Museum of Australia called The History Wall. What the History Wall does is quite simple, it pulls together data on the fly from a variety of sources including People Australia, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, the National Library’s newspapers project, historical population data from the Bureau of Statistics, photos from the Flickr accounts of the PowerHouse Museum and the National Archives, and the collection database of the National Museum itself. It chooses randomly from all this stuff, throws the results up into the air and then displays them however they happen to fall. No two views are ever quite the same.

http://defining.net.au/wall/

It’s something more than a timeline. To me it’s more like a celebration of context and serendipity. There’s a richness to it, a sense of discovery and fun, but there’s also fragility — next time you look it might be gone.

It’s a bit like history itself.

It’s a bit like the world.

How do we create spaces for our data to merge and mingle? How do we encourage the development of new contexts and connections?

I think the first thing we have to do is stop thinking about databases and dictionaries, registers and encyclopaedias. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being critical of the wonderful projects we’ve seen today. I just think we can use all this work better if we stop thinking about individual resources and start developing on a web scale, on a global scale.

Yes, we have the technology. Time today has spared you from a detailed discourse on the Semantic Web, but I do want to focus on one aspect.

You may have heard of Linked Data, it’s a set of guidelines to help you publish your data to the Semantic Web. There are only four basic principles and I’m only going to talk about one of them. It’s one of those deceptively simple things. You look at it and think, ‘yeah, ok’, but before too long it’s starting to turn your brain inside out.

Use URLs to identify things in the real world.

Yeah, ok…

You know what URLs are, web addresses, the things you type in your browser’s location field.

And hopefully you know what things in the real world are: people, places, objects, events, ideas…

Now you may have detected a problem here, because no matter how many times you click the refresh button, your web browser is not going to be able to use such a URL to magically deliver you the real world thing.

Well, unless you’re on eBay.

Fortunately, the Linked Data guidelines provide for a bit of technical trickery that allow your browser to retrieve not the real world thing, but some information about that thing — perhaps in the form of a web page.

Why bother?

Names are powerful.

We share and use names to talk about things. Computers are the same. If we use URLs to identify things in the real world, then computers can start talking about them.

We can define and explore real-world relationships in an online environment. We can create rich, meaningful linkages across databases, across disciplines, across the world.

We can start building and thinking on a web scale.

**********

Thanks to the People Australia project, I can confidently claim that this is me:

http://nla.gov.au/nla.party-479364#foaf:Person

I keep meaning to get it on a t-shirt.

The most exciting thing about People Australia is not the EAC records or the aggregation of resources — it’s the identifiers, because they enable us to say things about people anywhere on the web that computers can understand and relate back to a specific real world entity — a person.

You can start doing it now with Wragge’s Identity Browser.

http://wraggelabs.com/identities/

This is a little tool I built using the People Australia API. It makes it easy to find identifiers for people and organisations, and it supplies you with some code that you can drop into a blog post or web page that will tell a computer that a name relates to a thing called a ‘person’ , that this person’s name has a certain standard form, and that this person can be uniquely identified by People Australia.

Even if you don’t publish a website or a blog, you can use People Australia identifiers to build semantic linkages. Wragge’s Identity Browser also creates machine tags for you. Machine tags are like normal tags but with built in semantics. When coupled with identifiers they enable you to do some pretty powerful things.

You could for example use machine tags in Flickr to tell computers that a certain photo depicts a person uniquely identified by People Australia. In fact, people have been doing just that.

http://wraggelabs.com/fmtc/

The Flickr Machine Tag Challenge is a sort of scoreboard that I built to encourage people to start adding People Australia enriched machine tags to photos. More than 1200 tags have been added to over 1000 photos. Feel free to join in!

The point is that the technologies already exist to enable us to build web scale biographical resources. Not dictionaries or databases as we know them, but networks capable of constant expansion, elaboration, and cooperation.

What we need are more tools to make it simple, recipes to make it obvious, examples and applications to make it popular, and leadership to make it all seem possible.

**********

Of course most of the lives we hope to liberate through Invisible Australians will not be represented in People Australia.

Not yet.

But Invisible Australians will offer a point of aggregation and disambiguation that will enable our people to find their way from the bureaucratic recesses of the White Australia Policy to a place on the national stage.

And we will encourage others to do likewise. Basil can’t do all the work. The centralised system has to be fed through centres of aggregation and collaboration.

Similarly, there are many great resources already out there relating to Chinese-Australians. There are hordes of family and local historians compiling and publishing biographical data. We want to identify people in these resources and link to them.

We want to publish up to People Australia and link down to a single headstone in a lonely country cemetery.

But to do this we need to help people make their resources linkable. To help them create persistent, re-usable URLs, and expose their data in standard formats. To create Linked Data, even if they have no particular interest in the Semantic Web.

http://invisibleaustralians.org/

Invisible Australians is not just about extracting data from archives. It’s also about working with others to build capacities and demonstrate possibilities.

It’s ridiculously ambitious, totally unfunded and is likely to take over our lives.

Is it worth it?

We think so.

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 both within and between our institutions to foster such experimentation. Is that asking too much? Anyway… read, enjoy, use!

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. All it does it find out how many pages are in the file and insert the number in the link text. It’s very simple. But I think it’s also a useful illustration of the changing balance of power between archives and their users.

William E Landis argued that archivists were ‘guilty as a profession of fetishising the outputs of our descriptive systems’. The design of finding aids have often been determined not by the needs of users but by a desire to faithfully represent the underlying archival architecture. But now users don’t have to just take what they’re given.

Technologies such as Greasemonkey are useful for sketching out alternatives. For organisations with IT systems that inhibit experimentation, Greasemonkey (or Mozilla’s Jetpack) provides a way of playing with interfaces without touching any of the underlying code. My rewrite of the way RecordSearch displays digitised files is an example of this.

But no one interface is ever going to meet the needs of all archive users. Fortunately, there are a growing number of ways in which archives can work in partnership with their users to help them create the interfaces they want and need.

Archives are starting to expose their data directly using APIs and linked open data. This gives users the power to create whole new applications. But I still think there’ll be a place for the little tweak – a simple hack that meets some small but specific need. I can imagine communities of interest building and sharing a range of tools, hacks, applications and interfaces specifically tailored to their research habits.

So if you don’t like it, fix it.

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 same data that Mitchell Whitelaw visualised so brilliantly in his Visible Archive project. There’s also item data and images from series A3560 – the Mildenhall photographs of early Canberra.

What’s even more exciting is that people are already using this data. At the recent GovHack event in Canberra the What The Federal Government Does team worked on visualising the activities of government by using functions data pulled from the agencies file. Another group has generated a really nice tag cloud and photo gallery from the Mildenhall data. With further GovHack sessions to follow and the MashupAustralia contest open until 13 November, let’s hope for some more inspired archives hacking.

Seeing RecordSearch data out in the world like this reminded me of a little project I started a while back and then set aside. It was a simple PHP script that scraped data from RecordSearch and spat it out either as XML or JSON. Mitchell used a version of this script in his A1 Explorer in order to find out the number of pages in each digitised file.

I’ve now expanded and improved the script so that it provides data on items, series, agencies and persons. The output includes all the basic fields as well as links between entities – such as related series, controlling agencies etc. As an added bonus you also get some useful totals (where they’re available): items include the number of pages, series include the number of items described on RecordSearch, and agencies include the number of series recorded. I’ve also fiddled with mod_rewrite to provide a more rest-ful interface.

For XML output use the url http://discontents.com.au/shed/rs/xml/ followed by the appropriate identifier – a barcode for an item, a CA number for an agency, a CP number for a person or a series number.

Some examples:

• Series A1 – http://discontents.com.au/shed/rs/xml/a1
• Item B2455, WRAGGE C L E – http://discontents.com.au/shed/rs/xml/3445411
• CSIR Head Office – http://discontents.com.au/shed/rs/xml/CA+486
• Alfred Deakin – http://discontents.com.au/shed/rs/xml/CP+9

As you might have guessed, to get JSON output you just substitute ‘json’ for ‘xml’ in the url.

Being dependent on screen scraping, it’s inherently a bit fragile, but I’m hoping it might be of some use. My intention was to use it to start exploring some new ways of using and interacting with the data. The code itself is available at BitBucket. It’s not very elegant, but I don’t want to spend much time cleaning it up at the moment. If it seems like it might be useful, I’ll probably rewrite the whole thing in python and publish it through Google’s AppEngine.

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…

Well, yes… I couldn’t resist having a go. My tool of choice for this was Yahoo Pipes which has various modules for manipulating and creating RSS feeds. Check out my script on the Yahoo Pipes site to create a badge like this, play some more or inspect its innards. If you’re feeling adventurous you can even clone the script and tinker away yourself – it’s the best way to learn.

At the moment the script aggregrates content from the Flickr photostreams of:

• National Archives of Australia
• State Records NSW
• State Library of NSW
• State Library of Queensland
• State Library of South Australia
• Australian War Memorial
• Powerhouse Museum

These are mixed up with the contents of the Powerhouse’s ‘Object of the week‘ blog and the NAA’s ‘Find of the Month‘. I’m happy to add more sources – leave your suggestions below.

Most of it was ridiculously easy. I just added the RSS feeds from Flickr and the Powerhouse blog, then fed them through a module to sort them into date order. ‘Find of the month’ was trickier because there was no existing RSS feed – time for some screen-scraping! First I scraped a list of the urls for 2009, then for each month I pulled out the title and date, as well as the first paragraph to act as a description, and the first image. Then I turned all these bits and pieces into an RSS feed and joined it up with the rest.

Yahoo Pipes makes this sort of thing simple, even for non-coders. Interestingly, too, it’s not just a matter of creating an RSS feed – as you can see Yahoo Pipes emits the data in a variety of formats. You can subscribe to the RSS feed, create a badge or slurp up the data in JSON to power some new application.

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 part of the story. Released into the wild, these photos are slowly picking up the habits of the locals. They are making friends, building connections, even speaking with new accents and dialects. Commented, tagged, organised, linked – they are building new contexts for themselves outside of the cloying control of archival descriptive systems.

Unfortunately it seems there is often a chasm between the old lives of the photos, documented in databases and finding aids, and their new post-institutional careers. This is a pity because the new contexts they are gathering can help us both understand and find them. What can we do to overcome this divide? How could finding aids harvest and display the user-generated content that aggregates around collection items living in the outside world?

The good news is that the tools to start doing this already exist – Flickr has a powerful API that makes it easy to extract photo metadata. Time for a bit of experimenting…

The first result is a userscript that displays Flickr comments in a number of collection databases. Just install it and then try it out:

• National Archives of Australia Photosearch – try it!
• State Records NSW Photo Investigator – try it!
• National Archives and Records Administration ARC – try it!

Flickr comments in PhotoSearch

Gory details follow…

So to begin with I thought I’d just harvest comments from Flickr and display them within existing collection interfaces. As before (here and here), Greasemonkey was my tool of choice for hacking finding aids. The plan was to trigger a Greasemonkey script when you arrive at a photo in a collection database, the script would then:

• extract a unique identifier for the photo that could be used to find it in Flickr
• send off a request through the Flickr API to see if the photo was there
• if so, then fire off another request to retrieve any comments
• format the comments and insert them at a suitable point in the DOM of the database page

Easy! Obviously for the script to work there needed to be a way of connecting entries in the database with photos on Flickr. In practice this means that the photos need to be described at item level, and that a unique identifier needs to be used somewhere in the description of the photo both on Flickr and in the collection database.

Any archive that meets these criteria is a candidate for inclusion. Only three pieces of information are necessary:

• the institution’s Flickr id
• an expression to extract the identifier from the database page
• an expression to identify the point on the database page at which the comments should be inserted

The expressions could use XPath or regular expressions – whatever it takes to find the desired elements. I’m using JQuery, so that makes selecting elements a lot easier. For example, NARA ARC includes the item identifier in a div with the class ‘arcID’, so I just select that element using JQuery and then use regex matching to pull out the number:

this.identifier = $('.arcID').text().match(/ARC Identifier (\d+)/i)[1];

To start with I’ve included the databases of three institutions:

• the National Archives of Australia’s PhotoSearch database
• State Records of NSW’s Photo Investigator
• the US National Archives and Records Administration’s Archival Research Catalog

This is the code to save the settings for each institution:

<br />
if (document.location.href.match(/naa.gov.au\/scripts\/PhotoSearchItemDetail.asp/i)) {<br />
this.name = 'NAA';<br />
this.identifier = document.location.href.match(/M=0&#038;B=(\d+)/)[1];<br />
this.flickrId = '24849862@N08';<br />
this.position = 'table:last';<br />
} else if (document.location.href.match(/records.nsw.gov.au\/asp\/photosearch\/photo\.asp\?/i)) {<br />
this.name = 'StateRecordsNSW';<br />
this.identifier = document.location.href.match(/photo\.asp\?([\d\w_]+)/i)[1];<br />
this.flickrId = '27331537@N06';<br />
this.position = 'table:first';<br />
} else if (document.location.href.match(/arcweb.archives.gov\/arc\/action\/ShowFullRecord|arcweb.archives.gov\/arc\/action\/ExternalIdSearch/i)) {<br />
this.name = 'NARA';<br />
this.identifier = $('.arcID').text().match(/ARC Identifier (\d+)/i)[1];<br />
this.flickrId = '35740357@N03';<br />
this.position = '.genPad:first';<br />
}<br />

From there it’s just a matter of building the calls to the API using Greasemonkey’s built-in  GM_xmlhttpRequest method. Once the comments are retrieved, they’re given some basic formatting and inserted at the point in the DOM identified by the siteDetails.position property. Once again, JQuery greatly simplifies all the DOM manipulation. If there are no comments then a suitable message is inserted together with a link to the photo in Flickr. Finally some CSS is added to prettify it all a little bit.

You can view the full code on the Userscripts site.

Of course, it would be good to have this sort of stuff happening on the server side. In fact, with a few small modifications, this script could just be dropped into the code of any of the collection databases I’ve used. But in the meantime, Greasemonkey gives us a chance to play around with some of the possibilities – to start thinking about what finding aids might be like.

So what’s next? I’d like to do some playing around with tags and locations, perhaps using them to suggest related photos. I’ve also just realised that Flickr machine tags allow semantic markup… hmmm…

If you have any suggestions for databases to add to this script – let me know!

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 there are direct links into the National Archives’ database RecordSearch. However, there are currently no links going to other way. Why does this matter? Well perhaps you’d like to use NameSearch to find an individual record, but then add a scrapbook post in Mapping our Anzacs. Up until now you had to find them all over again. But not any more…

Introducing our new range of ‘View in Mapping our Anzacs’ buttons:

• For the discerning Firefox devotee we have a Greasemonkey userscript which adds a button to the RecordSearch item details page.
• For fashion-challenged IE user we have a bookmarklet. Just right click on this link – View in Mapping our Anzacs – and save it as a favourite in your ‘Links’ folder (you may need to enable the ‘Links’ toolbar first by checking Tools > Toolbars > Links.)

Yes, it’s true… you could use the Bookmarklet with Firefox (just drag it to your bookmarks toolbar), but Greasemonkey is so much more chic.

Once you’re fully button-enabled just head into RecordSearch, find an item in series B2455 (the WWI service records) and click! Hurrah! You will be instantly transported to Mapping our Anzacs.

You can test out your new button by heading here:

• B2455, WRAGGE C L E

All dressed up – RecordSearch has a new look

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 the beginning.

As you can see from the screenshot, I’ve tried to give the images as much as the screen as possible. I’ve also created a consistent set of navigation buttons, and improved the functionality in various ways.

Archives in 3D – CEDTs from NAA: ST84/1, 1906/21-30

But the most exciting thing is that I’ve worked out how to feed the images to the fabulous CoolIris 3D wall. My previous version used the javascript version of CoolIris, which displayed the images as a flat (but still very nice) slideshow. But now, if you have the CoolIris plugin installed you can zoom, pan, fly through the file, dipping in and out as you so desire. It’s a new way of looking at archives.

You can zoom in and out, even see a complete file on a single screen – NAA: B2455, WRAGGE C L E

To try for yourself you need to have Firefox with the Cooliris plugin installed. Then you need to get the Greasemonkey extension and, finally, install my userscript. Then just dive into RecordSearch, find a digitised file and enjoy!

File links:

• NAA: ST84/1, 1906/21-30
• NAA: B2455, WRAGGE C L E