This is the text of my keynote address to the Digisam conference on Open Heritage Data in the Nordic Region held in Malmö on 25 April 2013. You can also view the video and slides of my talk, or experience…
This is the text of my keynote address to the Digisam conference on Open Heritage Data in the Nordic Region held in Malmö on 25 April 2013. You can also view the video and slides of my talk, or experience…
Yep, there’s a new version of QueryPic. About 18 months ago I created a little Python script to visualise search results in Trove’s collection of digitised newspapers. After a bit more tweaking. I christened it QueryPic. People started to use…
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.…
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…
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…
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.…
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.…
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…
