Category:

shoebox

September 10, 2009 /

Playing with pipes

The ever-informative Twitter alerted me recently to the History Trust of South Australia’s object of the month. It made me think that it would be nice if there was some way of bringing together all those objects, photos and documents featured by our cultural institutions. Some sort of combined RSS feed perhaps?

Something like this…

Well, yes… I couldn’t resist having a go. My tool of choice for this was Yahoo Pipes which has various modules for manipulating and creating RSS feeds. Check out my script on the Yahoo Pipes site to create a badge like this, play some more or inspect its innards. If you’re feeling adventurous you can even clone the script and tinker away yourself – it’s the best way to learn. Read MorePlaying with pipes

August 24, 2009 /

Harvesting context #1: Flickr comments

Instead of idly waiting for visitors to stumble over their holdings on some lonely information by-way,  archives are starting to push their content out into the bustling metropolis of the social web. They are going where the people are. Photographic collections, in particular, are gaining new lives and new audiences thanks to Flickr.

But that’s only part of the story. Released into the wild, these photos are slowly picking up the habits of the locals. They are making friends, building connections, even speaking with new accents and dialects. Commented, tagged, organised, linked – they are building new contexts for themselves outside of the cloying control of archival descriptive systems.

Unfortunately it seems there is often a chasm between the old lives of the photos, documented in databases and finding aids, and their new post-institutional careers. This is a pity because the new contexts they are gathering can help us both understand and find them. What can we do to overcome this divide? How could finding aids harvest and display the user-generated content that aggregates around collection items living in the outside world?

The good news is that the tools to start doing this already exist – Flickr has a powerful API that makes it easy to extract photo metadata. Time for a bit of experimenting… Read MoreHarvesting context #1: Flickr comments

January 30, 2009 /

MoA buttons galore

December 22, 2008 /

A wordled Constitution

December 17, 2008 /

Archives in 3D

All dressed up – RecordSearch has a new look
All dressed up – RecordSearch has a new look

The new version of my Greasemonkey userscript, RecordSearch Image Tools, gives RecordSearch’s digital image pages a rather new look. My previous version had done away with the tired ol ‘lemon-chiffon’ background colour, but I decided it was time to get a bit more adventurous, so I blitzed the old design and rebuilt the page from the beginning.

As you can see from the screenshot, I’ve tried to give the images as much as the screen as possible. I’ve also created a consistent set of navigation buttons, and improved the functionality in various ways. Read MoreArchives in 3D

August 1, 2008 /

Looking at the sun

From Wallal, in Australia’s far north-west, to Goondiwindi, near the New South Wales-Queensland border, local and international scientists watched the sun and waited.

A total solar eclipse was due on 21 September 1922. An eclipse always held scientific interest, but this one offered the chance to confirm one of the most revolutionary theories in science. Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted that light passing near an object such as the sun would be bent by gravity. In 1919, Arthur Eddington’s observations of a total solar eclipse lent support to Einstein’s theory, but some challenged his results. The 1922 eclipse, best observed in Australia, promised to decide the matter. Read MoreLooking at the sun

November 14, 2006 /

Civilisation versus the giant, winged lizards

Tim Sherratt, ‘Civilisation versus the giant, winged lizards – Changing climates, changing minds’, Altitude, no. 7, 2006.

 

‘Modern man is a forest butcher’, warned the pioneering science journalist Hugh McKay in 1923. ‘He is also an oil-spendthrift and a coal waster’, McKay continued, ‘recklessly spending his capital of fuel… with never a thought of the tomorrow when he will stand shivering and motionless in the middle of a coal-less, oil-less, treeless, steel-less planet’.1 Read MoreCivilisation versus the giant, winged lizards

  1. McKay, Hugh Cleland. ‘Mankind’s Last Stand’. Smith’s Weekly 15 September 1923: 29. [↩]
May 1, 2005 /

Remembering Lawrence Hargrave

Author’s pre-print version

Tim Sherratt, ‘Remembering Lawrence Hargrave’, in Graeme Davison and Kimberley Webber (editors), Yesterday’s Tomorrows: The Powerhouse Museum and its precursors, 1880-2005, Powerhouse Museum in association with UNSW Press, Sydney 2005, pp. 174-185.

 

Hargrave's models on display, 1919.
Remembering Lawrence Hargrave – Hargrave’s models on display, 1919.

In 1962 William Hudson Shaw, a Qantas executive, knocked at the door of a cottage in the seaside village of Walmer, Kent. Shaw was in the grip of an obsession – a ‘labour of love’ to document the ‘true story’ of Australian aeronautical pioneer Lawrence Hargrave.1 This quest had brought Shaw to the home of Helen Gray, Hargrave’s eldest daughter, his beloved ‘Nellie’. Now into her 80s, Helen Gray remained firmly protective of her father’s memory, yet strangely ambivalent about his achievements. Nonetheless, through Hudson Shaw’s visit and the correspondence that followed, the two became friends and collaborators. ‘I feel so grateful that you have such great interest in L.H. [and] his work’, the elderly woman wrote in 1963, ‘what a difference it has made to my life that you appeared at the right time’.2 The biographer gained insight into the personal life of his subject, and the daughter was relieved of the burden of defending her father against the ill-formed judgments of history. Read MoreRemembering Lawrence Hargrave

  1. W H Shaw to Margaret Hudson, 6 December 1963, and to Roger A Dane, 21 January 1964, W H Shaw papers, National Library of Australia: MS 5661. [↩]
  2. Helen Gray to W H Shaw, 25 March and 13 November 1963 [incorrectly dated 1962], Shaw papers. [↩]
March 1, 2005 /

Frontiers of the future

Tim Sherratt, ‘Frontiers of the future: science and progress in 20th-century Australia’, in Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis (editors), Dislocating the frontier: essaying the mystique of the outback, ANU E-Press, Canberra, 2006, pp. 121-142.

 

The glow of his campfire framed a simple tableau of pioneer life. Across this ‘untenanted land’, Edwin Brady mused, ‘little companies’, such as his own, sat by their ‘solitary fires’. ‘They smoked pipes and talked, or watched the coals reflectively’. Around them, the ‘shadowy outlines’ of the bush merged into the dark northern night, and ‘the whispers’ of this ‘unknown’ land gathered about. It seemed to Brady that this camp, this night, represented the ‘actual life’ of the Northern Territory as he had known it. But the future weighed heavily upon that quiet, nostalgic scene. The moment would soon fade, Brady reflected, as the ‘cinematograph of Time’ rolled on. It was 1912, and something new was coming.1 Read MoreFrontiers of the future

  1. Edwin James Brady, Australia Unlimited, p. 570. [↩]
January 1, 2005 /

Human elements

Author’s preprint version

Tim Sherratt, ‘Human elements’, in Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (editors), A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia, National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra, 2005, pp. 1-17.

 

‘I say emphatically that the climate has changed’, Henry Hodgson told the Argus in 1928. The experience of seventy-eight years brooked no denial, summers were milder, and thunderstorms were fewer. ‘It is no use telling me that weather bureau statistics do not bear this out’, he added defiantly. ‘You can do anything with statistics, but no statistics will convince me that the climate has not changed radically.’1

It’s hard not to have some sympathy for Mr Hodgson, for even as we express our concerns about global warming and educate ourselves about the characteristics of Australia’s variable climate, there remains a nagging feeling that somehow he was right. Think back to the boiling-hot Christmases of your youth, to those long weeks spent at the beach, and answer honestly – do you remember summer as being hotter? Read MoreHuman elements

  1. Argus, 29 December 1928, p. 15. [↩]