Testimonials

Do you find this blog useful? Have you been inspired by one of my talks or workshops? Do you use any of my tools?

I’m committed to making my various experiments and research projects publicly accessible, and I often hear anecdotally that people find my tinkering valuable. But when it comes time to apply for a job or a grant it’s hard to point to any real evidence. So I’ve created this testimonials page to try and collect some examples.

If I’ve helped you please feel free to add your thoughts below. Thanks!

Assorted mentions

Archives viewer

From Christina Twomey (Monash University):

I have just used the NAA Archives viewer you created. It is simply fantastic and I wanted to write and say how much I appreciate it! As a longtime archives user, there have been years of frustration viewing those digitised pages one at a time. The capacity to save the whole file as a .pdf is also brilliant.

Many thanks again for your ingenuity and know-how.

THATCamp Digital Humanities and Libraries 2012

Trevor Munoz organised a session at THATCamp Digital Humanities and Libraries that used my work as an example of how digital humanists can make use of online collections:

The second inspiration is the great work that Tim Sherratt (@wragge) has done and continues to do with digital collections at a variety of Australian institutions. (Seriously, someone give this man a job.) I particularly recommend looking carefully at the work Sherratt has done with digitized collections from the National Archives of Australia in projects like Invisible Australians.

Harold White Fellowship Lecture

From Doug Moncur’s Stuff, geeky stuff blog:

Tim’s preso was entertaining funny and deeply interesting. I’m not going to summarise it but to make a different and equally serious point. A lot of this text mining work was done on a laptop with scripts.

No Amazon elastic compute, no farms of VM’s crunching data, just a laptop, some inspiration and access to some large data sets.

We often talk about ‘citizen science’ and that usually brings up a picture of geeky individuals doing species censuses. What Tim has shown is that given time and inspiration it is possible to do citizen data science.

Invisible Australians

Barbara Fister wrote in Inside Higher Ed:

In a sense he’s reverse-engineering the bureaucracy that once determined who was a proper Australian and is using the record-keeping used to control and oppress people to restore their history. He’s also taking what cultural institutions do – preserve, sort, interpret, and present culture – and reorganizing it using different rules. His search is guided by his questions, not by the categories the cultural institution uses… It’s an exhilarating demonstration of what can happen with open data and an open mind.

‘It’s all about the stuff’ at NDF2011

https://twitter.com/fogonwater/status/141681315199205377

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

4 Comments

  2. Jonathan O'Donnell
    November 3, 2012

    Tim Sherratt is one of the most inventive people working on digital history in Australia today. His tools act as exemplars of what is possible, as well as being massively useful in their own right.

    His enthusiasm is infectious and he is generous with his advice, enabling family and local historians around Australia to take advantage of his work.

  3. Paige Roberts
    November 6, 2012

    Every field has a few thought leaders. In addition to being a visionary for professionals in libraries, archives and museums around the world, Tim Sherratt is a skillful, hands-on practitioner in innovative digital humanities. His inspiring work embodies the values of generosity, collaboration, openness and learning so crucial to the future success and long-term value of cultural heritage to the general public as well as scholars. We are so fortunate to have him in our field.

  4. Tim Wray
    November 28, 2012

    Tim’s work is passionate, affective, noble and is exemplar of a man who works with the digital medium in giving us new ways of seeing in our rich histories otherwise locked away in the obscurity of bits and bytes. Both a hacker and a historian, Tim’s work embodies technical ingenuity with true curiosity and insight : his work shines as a living and breathing advertisement to the newly established field of digital humanities.

    I’ve had the pleasure of attending some of Tim’s insightful yet accessible talks on digital history. I was also part of a fun practical workshop that examined tools that help us unearth insights from historical and archival data-sets on the Web. I’ve learnt a lot from both experiences, and is overall very generous with his advice.

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