discontents

working for the triumph of content over form, ideas over control, people over systems

tfidf

Mining for meanings

May 9, 2012 By Tim Sherratt in digital humanities, speeches 2 Comments Tags: QueryPic, text mining, tfidf, Trove

Yes, I have a suit. On 8 May at the National Library of Australia I gave my suit an outing as I delivered my Harold White Fellowship presentation. Thanks to everyone who came along. If you missed it or want to relive the fun, the NLA has made a podcast available. My slides are also(…)

Latest Tweets

RT @TroveNewsBot: 9 Nov 1985: 'Judge frees Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter' nla.gov.au/nla.news-artic… // re ABC: abc.net.au/news/2014-04-2…
16 hours ago
New post (now with addendum!) — WWI faces, locating newspapers, 'Trove is', RN data, 'In a word', & Tung Wah Index: discontents.com.au/easter-eggsper…
16 hours ago
whoops, left something out of last night’s post...
17 hours ago
Ah, so that’s why I feel so tired...
1 day ago
New bloggage on recent eggsperiments… Includes WWI faces, locating newspapers, Trove is, @RadioNational, & In a word: discontents.com.au/easter-eggsper…
1 day ago

Recent Comments

Tim Sherratt (@wragge): New post (now with addendum!) — WWI faces, locating newsp…
@RoxanneShirazi: Impressive! MT @wragge: recent eggsperiments… WWI faces, …
Tim Sherratt (@wragge): New bloggage on recent eggsperiments… Includes WWI faces,…
@mistydemeo: “the real face of white australia” is one of my favouri…
@tjowens: "Real Face of White Australia" http://t.co/Wc9GaZ3dB4 IMHO …

Easter eggsperiments

No, nothing to do with Easter or eggs, but it’s Easter Sunday and who can resist a good opportunity for a bad pun? This is another catch-up post, pulling together some recent experiments. If nothing else, it’ll help me keep track of things I’m otherwise likely to forget. WWI Faces In our last instalment I(…)
Enriching WWI data with the Trove API

I can’t resist a challenge, particularly when it involves lots of new historical data and an excuse to muck around with the Trove API. So when Katie Hannan from the State Library of South Australia asked me about putting the API to work to enrich one of their World War I datasets, I had to(…)
An addition to the family

What’s the collective noun for a group of Twitter bots? Inspiration is failing me at the moment, so let’s just say that the Trove bot family recently welcomed a new member — @TroveBot. @TroveBot is a sibling of @TroveNewsBot, who’s been tweeting away since June last year. But while @TroveNewsBot draws his inspiration from 120+ million(…)
Have collection, will travel

A few years ago it seemed fashionable for cultural institutions to create a ‘My [insert institution name]‘ space on their website where visitors could create their own online exhibits from collection materials. It bothered me at the time because it seemed to be a case of creating silos within silos. What could people do with(…)
8 months on

This has been a rather lean year on the blogging front. So as 2013 nears its end, I thought I should at least try to list a few recent talks and experiments. Things changed a bit this year. No more am I the freelance troublemaker, coding in lonely seclusion, contemplating the mysteries of cashflow. Reader,(…)
Conversations with collections

Notes from a talk I gave at the Digital Treasures Symposium, 21 June 2013, University of Canberra. Over the last couple of weekends I’ve been building a bot. Let me introduce you to the TroveNewsBot. TroveNewsBot is just a simple script that periodically checks for messages from Twitter, uses those messages to create queries in(…)
‘A map and some pins’: open data and unlimited horizons

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 the full interactive experience by playing around with my text/presentation in all its LOD-powered glory.(…)