Presented at the DigitalGLAM Symposium, University of Melbourne, 15 July 2016.
Play with the slides.

Who’s used Commonwealth Hansard through the ParlInfo Database — particularly the early stuff, pre 1980?

Was it fun?

It’s great that all of that content has been digitised, but the user interface is not very friendly — one of the main problems is that it’s just really hard to read anything in context, to get a sense of proceedings in parliament as they unfolded.

However, you can bypass the interface and go straight to the data. There’s an XML file — with the proceedings in a nicely-structured, machine-readable form — for each day.

To save the world much searching and clicking, I wrote a script to crawl through ParlInfo and download all of those XML files. There’s about 4gb in total, and I’ve shared them all through my GitHub account. Feel free to download and explore!

I initially harvested the files because I thought they’d provide a useful example for use in teaching about text analysis tools and techniques. But then I reflected on that ‘readability’ question and wondered how much work would be involved in creating a version of Hansard that was focused on browsing and reading. The answer was about two days — over the space of a weekend I created Historic Hansard.

I wanted to mention this today because I think it’s a good example of a ‘hack’. Contrary to mainstream media coverage, most hackers don’t want to steal your credit card details. Hackers, within the diverse community of coders, builders, programmers, and developers, are people who use code to solve problems, to get around obstacles — their solutions might not be the most elegant, but they work.

My bio reads ‘historian and hacker’. I’m a historian who uses digital tools and techniques to get around obstacles. In particular, I use code to open digital cultural collections.

In the case of Hansard I have, for minimal cost, created something that allows you to explore the proceedings of parliament in context. It’s made some historians pretty excited. Since that first weekend I’ve added an index to people and bills. I’ve also integrated tools for text analysis and annotation. Shortly I’ll add the rest of the House of Reps and the Senate through until 1980. I was very pleased that the new PMs site from the Museum of Australian Democracy was able to harvest from Historic Hansard to boost their content.

So this is an example of what happens when governments or cultural heritage organisations provide openly-licensed data for people to play with — although I should note that the contents of the parliament website, including Hansard, have a ‘no derivatives’ licence which creates a lot of uncertainty around what you can actually do.

I’ve talked a lot in recent years about building stuff with cultural heritage data — particularly in relation to Trove. And I’ve created a lot of tools, experiments and interfaces — some significant, some silly, some downright creepy.

But while open data does enable mildly-obsessed hackers like me to build new, shiny things, it also enables us to ask different questions — to analyse what’s not there, as well as what is.

In the case of Commonwealth Hansard what’s not there is about two years’ worth of Senate proceedings. I stumbled on this while harvesting the XML files and started doing some analysis. Between 1901 and 1980, 94 days of Senate proceedings, and 8 days of the House of Representatives are effectively invisible. PDFs exist, but the XML files are empty and the content is not searchable.

As you can see, most of the ‘invisible’ days come from the WWI period. So if you’ve been relying on the online version of Hansard to research WWI, you probably need to think about what you might have missed.

Needless to say, it’s unlikely that anyone would have noticed these gaps using ParlInfo’s web interface. It’s yet another example of why you always be suspicious of search engines. But it’s also an example of how hacking collections opens them to new forms of analysis and enables us to critique the very notion of access.

Spend sometime reading the strategic plans of cultural heritage organisations and you’ll see that ‘access’ figures prominently — access is ‘provided’, ‘given’, and ‘opened’. Online access is a ‘deliverable’ to be measured in hits and sessions.

The problem with this is it casts the public as consumers of access, rather than creators. Hacking heritage collections is one way demonstrating that access is not a one way flow of information — it’s a struggle and it must always be. We should always be uncomfortable with the categories used to structure our past. We should always want more. If we run out of questions and criticisms then something’s gone badly wrong.

Who’s used the National Archives of Australia?

You’ve probably come across the process of ‘access examination’. Records more than 20 years old are assessed against a list of criteria to see if they can be released to the public — the criteria are defined under the Archives Act and relate to things like national security and privacy.

Most records end up with an access status of ‘open’, but some end up ‘closed’ and are withheld from the public. Last year I started wondering what happens when we flip around the idea of ‘access’ and focus on the files we’re not allowed to see?

The National Archives’ online database, RecordSearch, provides basic metadata about ‘closed’ files, including the reasons why they’ve been withheld. But you can’t easily search or analyse this data within RecordSearch itself. So I wrote another script that harvested details of all 14000 files with the access status of closed and created my own interface to them — Closed Access.

While my Hansard hacking was aimed at opening up new forms of use, Closed Access is about understanding the processes and practices that determine whether we’re allowed to see a file. It pushes beyond legislative definitions in an attempt to reveal ‘access’ as a process that is historically contingent — there is nothing magical, mysterious, or dangerous about a ‘closed’ file.

By hacking collections we can also see them differently. Amongst its millions of records the National Archives holds the remnants of the White Australia Policy. About 5 years ago I wrote a script to harvest several thousands of these documents. I ran them through a facial detection script, cropped out the portraits, and created this seemingly endless wall of faces.

It was another weekend project, another hack. In this case it exposed the remnants of a racist bureaucratic system in a completely different way. Instead of databases, record series, and files, you could see the people inside.

Of course the danger in raving about the wonders of hacking is that we simply create new structures of power, new limits on participation based around coding ability. I don’t believe in hacker elites liberating the masses from ignorance. So part of the struggle around access must also be the struggle to share — to share technology, code, examples, tools, data, knowledge, possibilities, and passions. To give people the opportunity to participate and not just consume.

You might think sharing is easy, but it’s fucking hard work — both for institutions and individuals. And it’s work that is rarely rewarded in terms of professional acknowledgement, advancement or funding.

But I’m inspired by open access activists around the world, by radical librarians setting up Tor exit relays, by digital humanists critically examining unequal access to technology, and exploring the possibilities of minimal computing. By all the people who freely share their work and ideas to make ‘access’ just that little bit easier for others.

I share because I think it’s important, because it’s part of the obligation of being a hacker and historian, academic and activist.

So I share things like:

• articles and examples on my blog
• code and data on GitHub
• current research notes and hacks in my research notebook
• documentation, activities, and tutorials in my digital heritage handbook
• web apps and sites all over the place

I’m also trying to develop a few DIY, low code examples that enable people to build things using Trove data and some freely available tools. I’m hoping that’ll give them the confidence to explore further. A starting point perhaps…

Just last week I ran a free digital heritage workshop in the lead up to GovHack — the national, open data competition. We’re hosting a specially-themed ‘Heritage Hack’ node at the University of Canberra as part of the GovHack this year. Feel free to join us!

Not that any of this is particularly special or remarkable. It should just be what we do — as researchers, as cultural institutions, as citizens, as hackers. The main thing we need to share is, of course, our power.

So let’s just just stop talking about access to cultural heritage as if it’s a destination, and explore it as journey full of tensions, dangers and difficulties; but also full of joy, discovery, and meaning. Let’s hack heritage to build critiques as well as websites, conversations as well as code.

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…

This is the full version of a paper I presented at the National Digital Forum, 30 November 2011.

In 1901, one of the first acts of the Commonwealth of Australia was to create a system of exclusion and control designed to keep the newly-formed nation ‘white’. But White Australia was always a myth. As well as the Indigenous population, there were already many thousands of people classified as ‘non-white‘ living in Australia — most were Chinese, but there were also Japanese, Indians, Syrians and Indonesians.

Here are some of them…

The administration of what became known as the White Australia Policy created a huge volume of records, much of which is still preserved within the National Archives of Australia. These photographs are attached to certificates that non-white residents needed to get back into the country if they decided to travel overseas. There are thousands upon thousands of these certificates in the Archives. Thousands of certificates representing thousands of lives — all monitored and controlled.

But is is too easy to see these people as the powerless victims of a repressive system. There were many acts of resistance. Some argued against the need to be identified ‘just like a criminal’. Others exercised control over their representation, submitting formal studio portraits instead of mug shots.

Most commonly and most powerfully, people resisted the policy simply by going ahead and living rich and productive lives.

My partner, Kate Bagnall, is helping to rewrite Australian-Chinese history by overthrowing the stereotype of the culturally isolated Chinese man living a lonely, meagre existence surrounded by gambling and opium dens. By mining the available records, by reading against the grain of contemporary reports and by working with family historians, Kate is documenting their intimate lives — their wives, their lovers, their families and descendants — the sorts of relationships that sent a shudder through the edifice of White Australia. Power can be reclaimed in many subtle and subversive ways.

‘The real face of White Australia’ is an experiment. It uses facial detection to technology to find and extract the photographs from digital copies of the original certificates made available through the National Archives of Australia’s collection database. The photographs you see here come from just one series, ST84/1. There’s no API to the collection so I reverse-engineered the web interface to create a script that would harvest the item metadata and download copies of all the digitised images. There are 2,756 files in this series. On the day I harvested the metadata, 347 of those files had been digitised, comprising 12,502 images. It took a few hours, but I just ran my script and soon I had a copy of all of this in my local database.

Then came the exciting part. Using a facial detection script I found through Google and an open source computer vision library, I started experimenting with ways of extracting the photos. After a few tweaks I had something that worked pretty well, so I pointed my aging laptop at the 12,502 images and watched anxiously as the CPU temperature rose and rose. It took a few emergency cooling measures, but the laptop survived and I had a folder containing 11,170 cropped images. About a third of these weren’t actually faces, but it was easy to manually remove the false positives, leaving 7,247 photos.

These photos. These people.

With my database fully primed and loaded it was just a matter of creating a simple web interface using Django for the backend and Isotope (a jQuery plugin) at the front. Both are open source projects. All together, from idea to interface, it took a bit more than a weekend to create, and most of that was waiting for the harvesting and facial detection scripts to complete. It would be silly to say it was easy, but I would say that it wasn’t hard.

What we ended up with was a new way of seeing and understanding the records — not as the remnants of bureaucratic processes, but as windows onto the lives of people. All the faces are linked to copies of the original certificates and back to the collection database of the National Archives. So this is also a finding aid. A finding aid that brings the people to the front.

According to Margaret Hedstrom the archival interface ‘is a site where power is negotiated and exercised’.1 Whether in a reading room or online, finding aids or collection databases are ‘neither neutral nor transparent’, but the product of ‘conscious design decisions’. We would like to think that this interface gives some power back to the people within the records. Their photographs challenge us to do something, to think something, to feel something. We cannot escape their discomfiting gaze.

But this interface represents another subtle shift in power. We could create it without any explicit assistance or involvement by the National Archives itself. Simply by putting part of the collection online, they provided us with the opportunity to develop a resource that both extends and critiques the existing collection database. Interfaces to cultural heritage collections are no longer controlled solely by cultural heritage institutions.

It’s these two aspects of the power of interfaces that I want to focus on today.

There are a growing number of examples where the records created by repressive or discriminatory regimes have, in Eric Ketelaar’s words, ‘become instruments of empowerment and liberation, salvation and freedom’.2 Nazi records of assets confiscated during the Holocaust have been used to inform processes of restitution and reparation. Government records have helped members of Australia’s Stolen Generations trace family members. Descendants of inmates incarcerated by American colonial authorities in what was the world’s largest leprosy colony in the Philippines, have embraced the administrative record as an affirmation of their own heritage and survival.3 Records can find new meanings. Power can be reclaimed.

Technology can help. Tim Hitchcock has described how something as simple as keyword searching can turn archives on their heads. Recordkeeping systems tend to reflect the structures and power relations of the organisations that create them. The ‘hierarchical and institutional nature of most archives’, Hitchcock argues, ‘contains an ideological component which is sucked in with every dust-filled breath’.4 But digitisation and keyword searching free us from having to follow the well-worn paths of institutional power. We can find people and follow their lives against the flow of bureaucratic convenience. We can gain a wholly new perspective on the workings of society. ‘What changes’, Hitchcock asks, ‘when we examine the world through the collected fragments of knowledge that we can recover about a single person, reorganised as a biographical narrative, rather than as part of an archival system?’5

Projects such as Unknown no longer may help us answer that question.

It’s aiming to extract the names and biographical details of slaves from the 8 million manuscript documents held by the Virginia Historical Society. The documents include court records, receipts, wills and inventories. Here is a page from the ‘Inventory of Negroes at Berry Plain Plantation, King George County, Virginia’ for 1855, listing names, occupations and valuations.

Tim Hitchcock is one of the directors of London Lives a project that similarly seeks to find the people in 240,000 manuscript pages documenting the lives of plebeian Londoners in the 17th century.

More than three million names have already been extracted from the records of courts, workhouses, hospitals and other institutions. Work is continuing to link these names together, to merge these various shards of identity and piece together the experiences of London’s poorest inhabitants.

Remember me from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum is working with photographs taken by relief agencies in the aftermath of World War Two. The photographs are of displaced children who survived the Holocaust but were separated from families. What happened to them? The project is seeking public help to identify and trace the children.

These are all projects about finding people. Finding the oppressed, the vulnerable, the displaced, the marginalized and the poor and giving them their place in history. This is what Kate and I hope to do with Invisible Australians, the broader project of which our faces experiment is part.

‘Invisible Australians’ aims to extract more than just photographs. We want to record and aggregate the biographical data contained within the records of the White Australia Policy — to extract the data and rebuild identities.

But we want to do more, we want to link these identities up with with other records, with the research of family and local historians, with cemetery registers and family trees, with newspaper articles and databases we don’t even know about yet. We want to find people, families and communities.

It’s ridiculously ambitious and totally unfunded. But it is possible.

The most exciting part of online technology is the power it gives to people to pursue their passions. As with the faces, we don’t need the help of the National Archives. We need the records to be digitized, but that’s happening anyway and we can afford to be patient. Most of the tools we need already exist, and are free. In the past 12 months, for example, there have been a number of open source tools released for crowd-sourced transcription of manuscript records.

People with passions, people with dreams, people who are just annoyed and impatient, don’t have to wait for cultural institutions to create exactly what they need. They can take what’s on offer and change it.

Interfaces can be modified. It is amazingly easy to write a script that will change the way a web page looks and behaves in your browser. I was frustrated by the standard interface to digitized files in the National Archives of Australia’s Recordsearch database — so I changed it.

Not only did make it look a bit nicer, I added new functions. My script lets you print a whole file or a range of pages and display the entire contents of the file on a pretty cool 3d wall.

I’ve shared this script, and a few other Recordsearch enhancements. Anyone can install them with a click and use them.

Interfaces are sites of power and we can claim some of that power for ourselves. Online technologies not only free us from the having to brave the physical intimidation of the reading room, they free us up to engage with the records in new ways. The archivist-on-duty would probably not be pleased if I pulled out some scissors and started snipping photos out of certificates. Or if I pulled a file apart and pasted it’s contents on the wall. But online we are free to experiment.

The power of cultural heritage organisations is perhaps expressed most forcefully in their ability to control the arrangement and description of their collections. ‘Every representation, every model of description, is biased’, note Verne Harris and Wendy Duff, ‘because it reflects a particular world-view and is constructed to meet specific purposes’.6 Archives, libraries and museums are already starting to share this power, by allowing tagging, or seeking public assistance with description through crowd sourcing projects. But most of the these activities still happen within spaces created and curated by the institutions themselves. Our cathedrals of culture might be opening their doors and inviting the public to participate in their ceremonies, but that doesn’t make them bazaars. The architecture stills speaks of authority.

In any case, people already have a space where they can explore and enrich collections — it’s called the internet.

It would be great to see cultural institutions doing more to watch, understand and support what people are doing with collections in their own spaces — following them as they pursue their passions, rather than thinking of ways to motivate them.

A quick example… You might have heard of Zotero, it’s an open source project that lets you capture, annotate and organize your research materials.

One cool thing about Zotero is that you can build and contribute little screen scrapers, called translators, that let Zotero extract structured data from any old collection database. You might not be surprised to learn that I’ve created a translator for Recordsearch. Another cool thing about Zotero is that you can share the stuff that you collect in public groups.

Put those two cool things together and what do you have? Well to me they spell out user generated finding aids — parallel collection databases created by researchers simply pursuing their own passions.

Linked Open Data greatly increases opportunities for collection description to leak into the wider web. If objects and documents are identified with a unique URL, then anyone can can make and publish statements about them in machine-readable form. These statements can then be aggregated and explored. Initiatives such as the Open Annotation Collaboration will hasten the development of these shared descriptive and interpretative layers around our cultural collections.

And of course all this descriptive and interpretative work can be harvested back to enhance existing collection databases. We could start doing it now — though I will spare you today my rant about the possibilities of mining footnotes.

As well as exploring the possibilities of user-generated content, cultural institutions are starting to open up their collection data for re-use. APIs are great (though Linked Open Data is better), and New Zealand is lucky to have an organisation like DigitalNZ which just gets it. People can and will make cool things with your stuff.

But again, we don’t have to wait for everything to be delivered in a convenient, machine-readable form. If it’s on the web anybody can scrape, harvest and experiment.

You probably all know about the National Library of Australia’s newspaper digitisation project — it’s building a magnificent resource. But I wanted to do more than just find articles. I wanted to explore and analyze their content on a large scale. So I built a screen scraper to extract structured data from search results, and then used the scraper to  power a series of tools. I have a harvester that lets you download an entire results set — hundreds or thousands of articles — with metadata neatly packaged for further analysis.

Or what about a script that graphs the occurrence of search terms over time, and allows you to ask questions like When did the Great War become the First World War?.

In the end I got a bit carried away and built my own public API to the Trove newspaper database.

I think it’s important to note that the tools I developed were guided by the types of questions I wanted to ask. While we should welcome APIs and celebrate their possibilities, we should also remain critical. APIs are interfaces, they too embed power relations. Every API has an argument. What questions do they let us ask? What questions do they prevent us from asking?

Even as we move from the age of lumbering, slow-witted data silos into the rapidly-evolving realms of Linked Open Data, we have to constantly question the models we make of the world. Ontologies and vocabularies are culturally determined and historically specific. Yes, they too are interfaces, complete with their own distributions of power and authority. But we can revisit and change them. And we can relate our new models to our old models, capturing complex, long-term shifts in the way we think about the world. That’s incredibly exciting.

All of this hacking, harvesting, questioning, enriching and meaning-making makes me think about the possibilities of grassroots leadership. Online technologies enable people to take cultural institutions into unexpected realms. They can build their own interfaces, ask their own questions, determine their own needs — they can point the way instead of simply waiting to be served.

You might wonder what the National Library of Australia thinks of my various scrapers and harvesters. I can’t speak for them, but I can say that they’ve awarded me a fellowship to explore further the possibilities of text-mining in their newspaper database.

The idea of grassroots leadership brings me back to the title of this talk — ‘It’s all about the stuff’. It seems to me that we tend to model the interactions between cultural institutions and the public as transactions. The public are ‘clients’, ‘patrons’, ‘users’ or ‘visitors’. But the sorts of things I’ve been talking about today give us a chance to put the collections themselves squarely at the centre of our thoughts and actions. Instead of concentrating on the relationship between the institution and the public, we can can focus on the relationship we both have with the collections.

It’s all about the stuff.

It’s all about the respect and responsibility we both have for our collections.

It’s all about the respect and responsibility we both have for people like this.

1. Margaret Hedstrom, ‘Archives, Memory, and Interfaces with the Past’, Archival Science, vol. 2, 2002, p. 22.
2. Eric Ketelaar, ‘Archival Temples, Archival Prisons: Modes of Power and Protection’, Archival Science, vol. 2, 2002, p. 229.
3. Ricardo L Punzalan, ‘Archives and the Segregation of People with Leprosy in the Philippines’, presented at ICHORA-4, University of Western Australia, 2008, pp. 93-102.
4. Tim Hitchcock, ‘Digital Searching and the Re-formulation of Historical Knowledge’, in Mark Greengrass and Lorna Hughes (eds), The Virtual Representation of the Past, Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008, p.87.
5. Tim Hitchcock, p.90.
6. Wendy M. Duff and Verne Harris, ‘Stories and Names: Archival Description as Narrating Records and Constructing Meanings’, Archival Science, vol. 2, 2002, p. 275.

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.