Tag Archives: invisibleaustralians

Exposing the archives of White Australia

I recently gave a presentation in the Institute of Historical Research’s Digital History Seminar series. The time difference between London and Canberra was a bit of a challenge, so I pre-recorded the presentation and then sat in my own Twitter backchannel while it played. For the full podcast information go to HistorySPOT. You can also [...]

Too important not to try

On Friday 19 October I joined an enthusiastic group of digital humanities explorers at a Deakin University event entitled Dipping a Toe into the Digital Humanities and Creative Arts. @catspyjamasnz has assembled an excellent summary of the day in Storify. “Every story” – making the data visible by @wragge #dhdeakin #research twitter.com/catspyjamasnz/… — Joyce Seitzinger [...]

The people inside

[View in Storify] A little hack to reveal faces in the archives.

Topic modelling in the archives

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. [...]

It’s all about the stuff — the movie

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…

It’s all about the stuff: collections, interfaces, power and people

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 [...]

Every story has a beginning

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 [...]

the real face of white australia

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 [...]

Liberating lives: invisible Australians and biographical networks

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). [...]

Hacking a research project

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, [...]