Last Saturday I was amongst a group of enthusiastic and knowledgeable volunteers getting stuck in to the ‘Doing our bit’ project at the Mosman Library. The Build-a-thon was the first stage in creating a new online resource documenting the experiences of World War I service people related to the Mosman area. We’re trying to make the whole process as open as possible, so the Build-a-thon was a way of exploring resources, issues, interfaces and ideas before we lay down too much code. You can read more on the project blog.

To provide some context for our labours, I gave a series of short talks:

• ‘Small stories in a big data world’ [video] [links]
• ‘A digital history toolkit’ [video] [links]
• ‘Telling stories and building interfaces’ [video] [links]
• ‘Connections and contexts through Linked Open Data’ [links]

You can see how the day unfolded on Storify, and view the participants hard at work on Flickr.

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 online at Scribd.

I ended up presenting something a little different, focusing on my recent work around 1913 and extracting editorials from the Trove newspaper database. You can view the slides on Slideshare or watch a video of the whole presentation on the VALA2012 site.