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 it. It was even reviewed in the Journal of Digital Humanities. With the release of [...]
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. In place of the ads were the day’s top stories, headlines and photographs — a [...]
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 [...]
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, Andrew S. Bowman and the Carnamah Historical Society are already blogging about it. But I suppose [...]
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 possibilities of digital history. You can download the pdf from the VALA2012 proceedings, or view [...]
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 work I finished a few weeks back. Oh well… In my previous instalments (here and [...]
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…
Back when I was looking at ‘When did the Great War become the First World War?‘ I promised a detailed post on how I constructed the graphs. But of course I got distracted. Then I started adding new features to the script and redesigning the graphs, so… Anyway, the result is a rather neat little [...]
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 — an attempt to put the method up front. While I didn’t think there was anything [...]
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. It’s an important argument and one that makes me wonder again about forms of publication [...]
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 it’s not all that easy to study. Or at least it wasn’t. Now projects such [...]
Here’s the slides from the talk I gave recently in the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia. Thanks to everyone who came and to the Scholars’ Lab for their hospitality. A podcast version is now available. View on SlideShare
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 all the tweaking, changing and adapting that you overlook a much simpler solution. So I [...]
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. Newspapers were a major source of my PhD research, and back then that meant learning [...]
