Keynote presentation to the Migrant (Re)Collections workshop, Leiden, 2016.

In 1861, the census for the colony of New South Wales (as it was back then) recorded just one Chinese woman living in Balmain in Sydney. The historian Eric Rolls, writing in 1992, commented that this ‘lone woman is exceptional and inexplicable’.

Inexplicable? My partner and collaborator Kate Bagnall is a historian of Chinese Australia and she recently investigated this case again, making use of digitised resources that were not available in the 1990s.

Her starting point was one tiny fragment in a digitised newspaper article on Trove. A report from the Water Police Court published in 1863 notes ‘the case of Ah Happ, a Chinese woman, who claimed the sum of £8 9s 6d. wages for her services as nurse in the employ of Cyril Cecil, of Snail’s Bay, Balmain’. The case was dismissed, but this brief, tantalising reference gave Kate enough information to trace the life of Ah Happ over the next 20 years or so, until she disappears from the records again. Kate now believes Ah Happ was the first Chinese mother in NSW. But was she the woman in the 1861 census?

The census has been big news in Australia recently, and not for the right reasons. I think the correct technical term for the handling of the 2016 census is omnishambles – there have been multiple failures both in communication and technology.

It all started to go wrong when the Australian Bureau of Statistics quietly announced that it would be keeping everybody’s names for longer than usual and using them to generate identifiers that would link the census with other government datasets. This might not seem so controversial on its own, but of course context is crucial.

Over the last few years there have been multiple reports of the misuse of personal information by a variety of government agencies. Nonetheless the amount of information being gathered has increased. In 2015, for example, new laws were passed for the retention of metadata documenting the communications of all Australians. The census, previously a trusted tool for government planning, suddenly seemed a further creeping, encroachment on individual privacy.

As a historian with an interest in the politics of surveillance I had mixed feelings about it all. Concerns about data matching are well justified, but the census constitutes a vital historical resource – often documenting lives that are barely glimpsed through other sources. The controversy also overshadowed the fact that since 2001, a growing number of Australians had agreed that their name-identified census data could be preserved by the National Archives of Australia for release to researchers in 99 years. In 2011, more than 60% of Australians willinging added their details to the so-called Census Time Capsule. How much of that trust will have now been lost?

We’re here to talk about questions of identity; to find better ways of matching records about people across historical datasets. So I think it’s important to think about the how these datasets came to be created. We are implicated in debates such as those that surrounded the recent Australian census. In some cases we are the beneficiaries of systems created for the surveillance and control of suspect populations. Time changes, but does not dispel, questions about our responsibilities to those we seek to identify.

Back in 2010 I wrote a blog post entitled ‘I link therefore I am’. The National Library of Australia had recently established a service called People Australia which brought together a range of biographical sources, disambiguated the names of people and organisations, and minted persistent identifiers for each new aggregated identity. The service still exists as part of Trove. People Australia was also, I think, the first of the Library’s online services to offer a public API.

This coupled with the development of Linked Open Data made me pretty excited. People Australia presented new opportunities to link resources across collections, but I was particularly interested in the possibilities for ordinary web users. After all, RDFa meant anyone with a web page could make Linked Data. There was also some activity at the time around machine tags – a sort of semantically-enriched tagging. Thanks to the vision of Aaron Straup Cope, machine tags were incorporated into Flickr in about 2009. They’re still there – just…

To try and bring some of these threads together I created a simple web service that took a name and returned a snippet of nicely formatted, RDFa enriched, HTML that you could drop into your blog post or web page. A bookmarklet made the markup process relatively seamless. Alternatively, you could ask for machine tags that could be cut and pasted into services like Flickr. Instant Linked Open Data for the masses.

I gave a talk about all this to a group of librarians and challenged them to use my identity finder thing (I’ve never been good at naming things) to add machine tags citing People Australia identifiers to photos on Flickr – to unambiguously identify either the subject or creators of the photos. To encourage them further I created the Flickr Machine Tag Challenge, an interface that enables you to explore photos tagged with National Library identifiers. This was, I think, a very early example of crowdsourcing Linked Data.

With all this swirling around it was perhaps inevitable that questions of identity would figure prominently when Kate and I started to think about what to do with the large quantities of records held by the National Archives of Australia documenting the operations of the White Australia Policy.

For the non-Australians here – yes, when the Australian colonies came together to form a nation, it was generally agreed that the nation would be white, and that this would be achieved through the control of immigration. Of course the substantial Indigenous populations were conveniently ignored in all this. The Immigration Restriction Act was passed by the first Australian parliament in 1901.

But what about the thousands of non-white people already resident in Australia – Chinese, Japanese, Malay, Syrian and more. They were allowed to stay, but their movements in and out of Australia were monitored – they had to carry special papers that would exempt them from exclusion. Many thousands of these certificates are preserved in the Archives, documenting in ironic detail the lives of people who weren’t supposed to be part of White Australia.

In 2010, Kate and I launched Invisible Australians – a project without any sort of funding or institutional support – aimed at drawing attention to these records. You might have seen one of our experiments – The Real Face of White Australia. It’s a simple scrolling wall of more than 7000 faces extracted from the Archives using a facial detection script. It was a weekend hack that has been cited around the world. But the power, of course, is in the faces themselves – they confront us with the reality of Australia’s racist past.

However, one of the main aims of Invisible Australians was to give names to those faces – to extract data from the archives that would enable us to link these tiny biographical fragments and follow people through time. I’m about to have another look at this based on recent developments in crowdsourcing software – something like the Zooniverse’s Measuring the ANZACs project would do a lot of what we wanted. But the project won’t be the same as we imagined it back then. I’ve grown increasing uncomfortable with what it means to identify people.

In November last year, Mark Matienzo, the Director of Technology at the Digital Public Library of America, gave a paper in which he raised important questions about Linked Open Data and the ‘power to name’. Like Mark I think we have an obligation to consider the contexts in which we create, recover, or aggregate identities. There is power in the process and we need to understand where it comes from and the violence it can do.

The question of identity was critical to the operations of the White Australia Policy. You might think that the certificates carried by non-white residents were nothing more than identity papers – an early form of passport. But the point is, only non-white Australians had to prove who they were. Moreover, the technologies used to determine identity – portrait photographs and handprints – were strongly associated with the management of criminal populations. Indeed, in 1911 one Chinese businessman objected to being treated ‘just like a criminal’. The process of identification helped justify the racist underpinnings of the system – the management of this suspect group required special measures.

The taint of suspicion followed non-white residents through their daily lives. The Immigration Restriction Act created the category of ‘Prohibited Immigrant’ to describe those who were present in Australia illegally. Kate tells the story of one unfortunate cook in Melbourne who was arrested by Customs Officers and accused of being a prohibited immigrant, mostly because he seemed a bit too Chinese. He was forced to prove who he was and how and when he had come to Australia. This was something of a challenge as he always believed he was born in Australia, and had grown up in Chinatown after being orphaned at a young age. This story seemed all too relevant when Australia’s immigration officials, now called ‘Border Force’, announced last year they would patrol the streets of Melbourne in a crackdown on visa fraud. Instead of ‘prohibited immigrants’ we now seek to identify ‘illegal maritime arrivals’. And in the US, Donald Trump wants to introduce ‘extreme vetting’.

I can’t now look at our wall of faces without wondering about the uses of facial detection. There are easily available web APIs that will not only tell you if an image contains a face, but whether the face is smiling, its gender, and its race. Both Google and Facebook have claimed frightening levels of accuracy with their facial recognition technologies – not just finding faces, but matching them against a set of known identities. In Australia, a number of image databases are to be linked to create a new facial recognition service called – The Capability. Our faces are increasingly not our own – they are public signifiers to be captured by systems of identity management and surveillance.

This is the context in which we undertake our explorations of identity, in which we exercise our power to aggregate, and to name. We can of course turn these systems on themselves, in the way that the residents of East Germany claimed the Stasi archives as their own. There are a number of examples where archives of oppression have been reclaimed in the struggle for justice. But we have to make that decision and engage accordingly. There is no neutral position.

For me this means finding better ways of representing the uncertainties of identity. Technologies of surveillance construct identity as an aggregation of data points – matches, crossreferences, and hits. Linked Data tends to work the same way, mapping the points of connection across multiple datasets. We know the points do not make the person, but we use them to create a shell identity, and therein lies the challenge. How do we fill that shell with the complexities and contingencies of life, without losing Linked Data’s ability to make meaningful and reusable connections.

As I mentioned, my early experiments with Linked Data were aimed at building simple tools that would give creators of content the power to enrich their work with structured data. Nowadays we have tools like Pund.it and Hypothes.is that allow us to build layers of annotation and enrichment on top of existing web resources. We also have platforms like Scalar and the forthcoming Omeka-S that give us the ability to define relationships between resources within the context of interpretation. These sorts of tools help us bridge the gap between the data we collect and the stories we can tell.

But it should be easier. Over the years I’ve made a few attempts to combine historical narrative with Linked Open Data – all of them buggy and incomplete. But it’s a project I keep coming back to for a number of reasons.

Firstly, historians create Linked Data all the time, they just don’t realise it. In the process of their research they build complex entity-relationship models, linking people, places, events and resources. But when it comes time for ‘writing up’, the data gets squeezed out to fit with the conventions of linear narrative and print publication. We need new publishing paradigms that maintain the relationship between narrative and data and expose full richness of historical practice.

Second, one of the things that has always attracted me to Linked Open Data is the idea that anyone can create it, anywhere. Embed some RDFa, reuse some identifiers, and hey presto – you’re publishing data about the world that can be aggregated and explored. At least in theory. In practice, developments in Linked Open Data seem to have been centralised around particular tools and institutions, or geared towards search engine optimisation. And yet, on the other hand, we continue to create specialised crowdsourcing platforms to foster public engagement with our cultural collections. Why not get better at sharing identifiers for collection items and support the development of simple Linked Open Data tools that can be used wherever content is created. Every blog post could become a collection portal.

And finally, because as much as I enjoy playing with data, stories are what really matters. Stories convey meaning and emotion in ways data cannot. They give us room to explore nuance and uncertainty. They make us human. I want to find better ways of enriching data with stories, and vice versa.

In 1908, James Minahan was declared a ‘prohibited immigrant’ and arrested. James had been born in Australia to a Chinese father and Irish-Australian mother, but when he was just five years old his father took him to live in China. When he returned 26 years later James spoke no English. How could somone born in Australia be a ‘prohibited immigrant’? The authorities argued that James’s connection to the country of his birth had been lost – culturally and racially, he could not be considered ‘Australian’. But the case was hardly clear cut and eventually ended up in the country’s highest court.

Kate has been researching the story of James Minahan for a number of years and has assembled a complex story of people, place, and law, drawn from the holdings of many cultural institutions. This time we’re not going to let the data be squeezed out. Currently a draft of the story sits in a demonstration system I built using JSON-LD and AngularJS.

It works well enough, but I’ve decided to throw out most of the code and start again. Why? I feel that I’ve been focusing so much on the interface that the simplicity of the system has been compromised. I’ve been playing by Angular’s rules and that makes me very uncomfortable. I’ve also been inspired by the work that’s been going on in DH around the idea of minimal computing – creating tools that are both simple and sustainable; that demand little technical infrastructure, but build capacity for innovative digital research.

Ed., developed by Alex Gil and his team is a wonderful example – beautiful both in its aims and execution. Ed. is a theme for Jekyll, the static site generator, that makes it easy to publish scholarly editions of digital texts. I’ve decided to build a set of plugins and examples that will make it possible to add a Linked Open Data layer to a text in Ed. The result will just be HTML – easy to publish, easy to preserve. Once I’m happy with the basics, I’ll think again about adding some Javascript trickery to the interface. At it’s simplest the data can be stored in a hand-edited YAML file. Not a triple-store in sight. There’s something strangely liberating about working with Jekyll.

There have been a lot of mentions of ‘sustainability’ in the past couple of days. For me, sustainability isn’t just about funding, or institutional support, or governance structures – it’s about building things that can be hacked, reused, shared, and fixed.

Perhaps it’s through systems such as this we can encourage and support the small-scale production of Linked Open Data, based not on machine learning or entity extraction, but on detailed research and individual expertise. The James Minahan story will not only explore the complexities of identity and belonging, it will map relationships between people, trace journeys through space, and provide a specialised subject guide to Australia’s cultural heritage collections. At least that’s the plan…

Perhaps we can find new ways of bringing together the microstories, that Marijke and others have mentioned, with the big pictures drawn from heritage data – of navigating changes in scale without losing sight of what matters.

And perhaps this mix of story and data can help us deal with the politics of identity more effectively – to share the power of naming, to provide space for uncertainty, to undermine the authority of those who seek to reduce us to a collection of data points.

I suppose you’re wondering about Ah Happ. Was she the woman in the 1861 census? Unfortunately the dates don’t quite match up, so it’s hard to be certain. But given what Kate now knows of Ah Happ’s history, the presence of the Chinese woman in Sydney in 1861 is hardly inexplicable. She was probably a domestic servant or a nursemaid. A data point left unnamed, but a person not unknown. Questions of identity are rarely that simple.

Keynote presented at Working History, the Professional Historians’ Association Conference, 19 August 2016, Melbourne.

There’s a video of the talk here, and slides here.

Friends, I come bearing good news. For I have seen the future of history.

Indeed I saw it here in Melbourne in February. There it was in the exhibition hall of the VALA2016 conference…

THE FUTURE OF HISTORY

…is a very fancy book scanner.

It’s easy to get caught up in the hyperbole – to imagine that history has been swept up in a technological revolution.

I must admit, I’ve often argued that access to more than 200 million digitised newspaper articles through Trove has profoundly changed the practice of history. I still believe that. It’s not just about convenience – the fact that you can now do your research at home in your pyjamas. It’s also about making the fragile slivers of ordinary human experience accessible in a way that just was not possible before. It’s given us the ability to tell different types of stories.

But is it a revolution? As historians I think we have an obligation to be sceptical of the ‘R’ word – we all know that for every change there is a continuity. And that’s what interests me in the digital space, the interplay between historical practicisibe and technology; between new possibilities and old critiques.

Fear not – you will not be rendered obsolete by army of sentient book scanners. But perhaps there are different ways we can work, different questions we can ask.

Discovery against the grain

So, Trove.

I’m assuming in audience such as this I don’t need to explain what Trove is. Of course Trove is much, much more than just digitised newspapers, but let’s just focus on those newspapers for a minute. What we’re talking about is:

• More than 200 million newspaper articles from 1803 onwards
• More than 1000 different newspaper titles – not just the metropolitan dailies; rural and regional papers; political, religious, and community papers; papers in a range of different languages.
• Terabytes of text – all searchable

I think we tend to take this last point for granted – not only can you explore 200 million newspaper articles online, but you can search inside them. I think there is real revolutionary force in the combination of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and keyword search. It shifts power away from the headline writers, the cataloguers, the archivists and the indexers, and opens an infinite number of pathways for discovery. I’m sure all of you have a story about some tiny fragment, a clue that was critical to your research, buried deep in a seemingly uninteresting newspaper article. This was always possible if you had enough time and physical access to newspapers, but technology has normalised this mode of exploration. We are no longer fossickers, scouring past workings in the hope of finding a gem. Whether we know it or not, we now all dig deep along unmapped seams of history and meaning.

But this is only one example of how discovery is moving beyond metadata – the information we record about resources – to mine the very content of those resources, to create new access points. Newspapers are easy, what about handwritten resources like letters and diaries? Technology has enabled new forms of collaboration between institutions and researchers, allowing them to create and share transcriptions of otherwise unsearchable documents.

As of last week, for example, volunteers had transcribed more than 16,000 manuscript pages from the papers of English philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham. What’s particularly interesting about the Transcribe Bentham project, is that the transcriptions are themselves being used to train new tools for automated handwriting recognition. Humans are teaching machines, who will in turn help humans to open resources to new forms of discovery. There’s still a way to go, but the possibilities are pretty exciting. What will happen when instead of consulting an index to a large collection of correspondence, we can search the complete content?

And it’s not just text.

Cultural institutions have been experimenting with colour as a way of navigating large image collections. The colour values of the images themselves are extracted, aggregated and normalised, allowing users to discover connections otherwise unknown or undocumented. Companies like Google are using artificial intelligence to generate descriptions of images. This technology might enable us to search millions of uncatalogued photographs held by cultural heritage institutions. Like switching on the lights in a darkened room, the application of computing power will help reveal stories lurking in the shadows of anonymity.

Assuming of course that they have been digitised.

The seeming omnipotence of Google has encouraged us to equate discoverability with existence – if we can’t find it, it doesn’t exist. But only a small proportion of our cultural heritage collections have actually been digitised. Even as we take advantage of these new technologies we have to think about what’s missing. Whose history has been digitised, described and processed, and why?

This graph shows the number of digitised newspaper articles in Trove by year. As experienced, professional historians you will of course know why there is a peak around 1914. More news…? More newspapers…? The answer is more money for digitisation. With the centenary of World War I approaching, it was decided to focus resources on the digitisation of newspapers from that era. This is completely understandable, but also largely invisible to users.

At the recent digital humanities conference in Hobart, Tim Hitchcock talked about the hidden histories that shape the online resources on which we now depend. We are working with collections of text, he argued, that are ‘inherently, and institutionally, Western centric, elitist and racist’. With dollars for digitisation becoming increasingly scarce we can expect more ‘project based’ funding responding to particular events or anniversaries. Will this simply reinforce the limits of our digital horizons?

We need to understand that we start our digital explorations from a point of privilege and exclusion. Decisions have been already been made about what and who matters. But within these limits we can continue to work against the grain, to flip perspectives, to see things differently.

About five years ago I worked out how to do bulk downloads of digitised files from the National Archive of Australia’s online database RecordSearch. My partner Kate Bagnall, a historian of Chinese-Australia, and I were particularly interested in the many thousands of records they hold documenting the workings of the White Australia Policy. So I downloaded about 12,000 pages, many including portrait photographs, and ran them through a simple program to find faces. The result was a scrolling wall of about 7,000 portraits that we called ‘The Real Face of White Australia’. The remnants of a racist bureaucratic system were turned inside out – instead of files and metadata you could see the people inside.

It’s these sorts of possibilities for seeing against the grain that get me most excited about digital technologies. We no longer have to accept what we’re given by cultural institutions, we can build and share new perspectives, even new interfaces.

One of my current projects is exploring the records held by the National Archives of Australia that we’re not allowed to see – those with an access status of ‘closed’. Anyone who’s used the National Archives knows that the access examination process can sometimes be a bit frustrating. But it is just a process – there’s nothing magical or mysterious about crossing the threshold from closed to ‘open’.

In this case there’s obviously no files for me to download, but there is data documenting when and why a file was closed. By harvesting that data from RecordSearch and feeding it through a new interface we can start to build up a picture of how that process works – we can investigate access itself as a historical phenomenon.

Working at scale

More than a decade ago, the pioneer digital historian Roy Rosenzweig talked about the challenges of digital abundance – how would historical methods change to deal with the vast quantities of digital content becoming available?

What does it mean when you search for something in Trove and find you have 10,000 matching results, or maybe 100,000, a million? We’re used to working in a linear fashion, interrogating our sources one at a time. So how can we extract understanding from a set of resources that we can never hope to examine individually?

It was this question that inspired me to create QueryPic, a simple tool for visualising searches in Trove’s digitised newspapers. You enter your keywords in the usual fashion, but instead of a list of search results you’re presented with a chart that shows you the number of articles each year that match your query. Instead of just the top twenty results, you see everything at once. Using QueryPic you can combine multiple queries to track changes in language or technology, or observe the impact of particular events. (In this case we’re comparing the use of the name ‘Santa Claus’ vs ‘Father Christmas’). It’s easy to create, save and share charts – have a go!

There are many similar tools around these days. Google’s Ngram viewer enables you to construct complex queries across the contents of millions of books. Bookworm lets you explore trends in a range of sources including US newspapers and the scripts of the Simpsons.

Most of these tools work by treating texts as data – by breaking texts down into their component parts, and then analysing the occurrence of particular words, phrases, or other patterns. Digital historians are lucky. Literary scholars have been working for decades on the computational analysis of text, and the tools they’ve created can be readily applied to historical sources.

Voyant Tools, for example, is a web-based text analysis platform. Feed it text files, web pages, XML, even PDFs, and it will slice and dice the language of your sources, opening the results for further exploration through a series of interactive tools. It’s powerful enough to handle many megabytes of data. In this it’s analysing the talk that I’m giving right now.

If you want to start somewhere simpler, have a play with DataBasic.io, where you can learn the fundamentals of text analysis by diving deep into the lyrics of Beyonce.

QueryPic generates large scale pictures using Trove’s digitised newspapers, but what if you want something more fine-grained? I’ve also created a Trove Harvester that will save the details of all newspaper articles matching a particular query to your own computer. Perhaps you want to look for patterns in the language of all articles that include the phrase ‘White Australia’. Just grab the contents of the articles using my harvester and upload them to Voyant. Bam!

This form of analysis is often termed ‘distant reading’. Instead of examining individual documents we use computational methods to look for patterns across a large collection of documents. By zooming out, we can explore the historical record at different scales, finding new connections and meanings.

Have you come across the Old Bailey Online? It’s an astonishing resource, providing fully-searchable text of nearly 200,000 criminal trials from 1674 to 1913. But of course it’s not just text. The data is structured so you can search by name, crime, verdict and punishment. Zooming out of individual trials, historians can examine changes in the way the legal system itself operated over time. Similarly, the Prosecution Project is compiling data about Australian criminal trials from a variety of sources, including Trove. Who knows what we might learn about the nature of our criminal justice system.

The data gathered by projects such as these allow distant reading not just of language, or institutions, but of populations. Who were these people whose lives intersected with the administration of the law and the operations of the state?

The Digital Panopticon project is now linking up records from a number of these different databases to track people from the Old Bailey, through transportation to Australia, and beyond.

One of the things I love about this sort of work is that the data is so richly and profoundly human. In this age of so-called ‘big data’ there’s a tendency to imagine that a focus on computational methods will somehow firm up the scientific credentials of the humanities. We have data too! Indeed, Google’s Ngram viewer was announced to the world as as the flag bearer of a new field called ‘culturomics’ that would bring statistical rigour to the historical study of language and culture.

Yes, it’s bullshit. Big data is made up of many small acts of living. And life, as we know, is messy and complicated, and resists our attempts at categorisation. That’s what makes history so much fun. As historians we have the opportunity, and indeed the obligation, to tease out the connections between the micro and the macro; between the unkempt trajectories of individual lives and the beautiful curves of our data visualisations.

Click any point on a QueryPic chart and you’ll see the first twenty matching results from Trove. QueryPic’s visualisations are not arguments, they’re starting points – ways of exploring ideas, or surveying new territory. Understanding comes from shifting scales – moving between individual articles and long term trends.

One of the things that excites me most about digital tools and techniques are the opportunities they create for navigating these changes in scale. We can create new resources and interfaces that bring together statistics and stories; that enrich our data with the power of narrative, and vice versa.

Doing it in public

A couple of years ago I started to collate information about websites that included links back to digitised newspaper articles on Trove. I wanted to understand more about the contexts in which the newspapers were being used and cited. The diversity of subjects and sites was astonishing, and sometimes disturbing. But what was particularly interesting was the amount of historical work some people were doing.

KnowThatProperty.com sounds a bit like a commercial real estate site, but in fact it provides potted histories of houses around Sydney, largely drawn from Trove. For example, the entry for number 2 Carrington Street in Strathfield, provides details of the house’s construction and ownership from 1888 to 1927, with over 40 links to newspaper articles in Trove. The creator of the site is a web developer with an interest in architectural history. But is he a historian?

Who cares?

Ready access to historical sources through services such as Trove allow people to pursue their passions, around and beyond the demands of everyday life. We are no longer subject to the tyranny of the microfilm reader. The work of history – the chasing down of connections, the exploration of context, the compilation of references – is no longer confined to designated places of research. Nor is it expressed solely in traditional forms of historical production.

Digital tools help us find things, but they also help us share them. We write blog posts, we collect on Pinterest, we repost on Tumblr, we ‘like’ on Facebook. You might think that this is all a bit trivial, and sometimes it is, but the dynamics of sharing help us to look at history differently. The ‘public’ are no longer external to the process of history making – an imagined audience, or prospective consumers. We’re just all in there together.

Who’s made a list on Trove? Trove lists are just collections of interesting items. You create lists on particular topics and use them to keep track of relevant resources. You might create and share and share a list of newspaper articles relating to your family’s history for instance. But, once shared, a list becomes something more than a convenient bucket of content. Lists provide thematic entry points that aid discovery by creating implicit links between items. They’re also building blocks for new forms of access.

Last year I created a web application that takes the contents of Trove lists and turns them into online exhibitions. Using freely available web services, you can create your own exhibition in minutes (yes, really).

I’m sorry, but I really don’t care about questions of authority or professional identity. The guy who created KnowYourProperty.com isn’t waiting for the historians of Australian to pin a membership badge on him. Nor, I suspect, is the bloke who has created more than 200 Trove lists about lawnmowers worried about whether what he’s doing is really history. I happen to think it is, but more importantly it’s about passion. It’s about just doing something. In a world that champions consumption over creation, conflict over collaboration, we should celebrate any effort to make an authentic connection to the past.

There’s something quite liberating about the fluidity of the digital environment. Instead of trudging the well-worn path from research to product we can explore the possibilities of reuse; we can experiment with form and meaning; we can play; and we can feel.

The Vintage Face Depot is a Twitter bot. Tweet a picture of yourself to it and you will receive back a modified you – your face will be blended with one drawn at random from a collection of faces extracted from Trove’s digitised newspapers. It sounds creepy and I suppose it is, but the effect can be quite interesting, sometimes unsettling. What happens when you see your own eyes peering out of a face from the past? The image is accompanied by a link to the original article on Trove, so you can find out more about who you’ve been blended with. Like a lots of my work, the Vintage Face Depot was made quickly as an experiment. I still don’t know what to think of it. And that’s good.

Caleb McDaniel’s Twitter bot, @every3minutes is a more deliberate intervention in our experience of the past. Historians of the American slave trade have estimated that a person was sold every three minutes between 1820 and 1860. So Caleb’s bot tweets, every three minutes – ‘someone just purchased a black person’s grandchild’, ‘a white slaver just sold a person’s friend’. It’s unrelenting and confronting.

We are finding new forms of historical expression that don’t merely visit the digital realm, they live there.

Show your working out

Earlier this year I sort of accidently created and shared my own version of Commonwealth Hansard. It’s a site that lets you browse the proceedings of the House of Representatives and the Senate from 1901 to 1980. I was originally intending just to harvest the data that sits underneath Hansard on the Australian Parliament House website. I thought all that nicely-structured text would provide an interesting dataset to poke around in using the sorts of text analysis programs I’ve already described. But after downloading about 4gb worth of data, I starting thinking about other things I could do with it.

If you’ve used Hansard on the Parliament site, you’ll know that it’s hard to read anything in context – you’re constantly navigating your way up and down a confusing hierarchy of debates and speeches. So I decided to make a version of Hansard that was focused on reading – one sitting day per page. That’s it.

But that simplicity has allowed me to do other things. Every year, and every sitting day, has a button that automatically opens the proceedings for that period in Voyant. That simple button turns a page of text into a laboratory for the historical analysis of political speech. I’ve also integrated Hypothes.is which allows anyone to annotate the text – adding notes, links, highlights, even images. Annotations created with Hypothes.is can be shared globally, turning each page of text into site for collaborative research.

Both Voyant and Hypothes.is can be added to any web page with just a couple of lines of HTML code. It makes you wonder why we are still recreating traditional forms of publication online, when we could be doing so much more, so easily.

You would have noticed that this set of slides itself embeds a number of graphs, visualisations, and live web pages that you can play with inside the presentation. The creators of Voyant, Stefan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell, believe it is important to create analytical tools, or hermeneutica, that can be embedded within works of scholarly interpretation. Voyant’s widgets encourage readers to play with the data and not merely consume the argument. They give power to readers to build their own interpretations, to make their own discoveries.

In a similar way, the historian Tom Griffiths has described footnotes as ‘generous signposts to anyone who wants to retrace the path and test the insights’. Footnotes too give power to the reader, but in a non-digital environment the ability to exercise that power is deferred, perhaps indefinitely. How can make sure those ‘generous signposts’ actually point somewhere?

Perhaps you’ve heard of a thing called Linked Open Data – it’s really just a way of publishing nicely structured data on the web so that it can be easily connected up across sites and collections. Historians create Linked Open Data all the time, they just don’t know it. Think about all those spreadsheets or index cards you have listing people, linking them to other people, places, events, and documents. In LOD terms these are all nodes and edges – entities and relationships.

Historical research frequently involves creating these sorts of complex data models. They represent a huge investment of skill, knowledge and experience. But what happens when we come to ‘write up’ our research? The data is squeezed out of the narrative, flattened down to comply with the conventions of linear storytelling. The connections are severed.

Kate and I are playing around with ways of combining historical narrative and Linked Open Data to make sure that the story remains in conversation with the data – to give readers the freedom to jump off at any time into the underlying network of people, places, events, and resources. And if those people, places, events, and resources are themselves linked to the holdings of libraries, archives, and museums, then every piece of writing becomes a gateway – a starting point for further exploration of our cultural collections. Generous signposts indeed.

Our latest LODBook experiment is available online. It’s buggy and incomplete, but gives a sense of what we want to do. I’d originally intended to have a nice, finished version to show you today, but I decided recently to throw out a lot of code and start again. Why? I always wanted something that was simple and sustainable – a set of practices and reusable components, rather than yet another publishing platform. Having been recently inspired by work going on around the idea of minimal computing, I decided I needed to focus more on the basics. So watch this space.

Digital tools and technologies give us the opportunity to experiment, and sometimes to fail. As I was harvesting text from Hansard I noticed a few oddities. After further investigation I realised that more than 90 Senate sitting days were missing from Parliament House’s online database, including about half of 1917. It’s unlikely anyone would have noticed the problem using the web interface unless they were looking for a specific date. Historians researching the World War I period just don’t know what they’ve missed. Fortunately the people at Parliament House are now investigating to see what they can do.

These things happen. Systems are never perfect. But when they do happen it’s important to talk about them. This is a great example of why we need to remain critical of search as a means of access – it can’t find what’s not there.

The story of the Senate black hole is documented in my open research notebook – it’s where I post notes and experiments relating to my current research projects. It’s an idea I’ve stolen from a number of colleagues working in digital history, including Caleb McDaniel, and I think it’s a good example of how the digital environment can encourage us to re-examine our practices.

The non-digital world privileges products as markers of achievement – things we can count, things we can launch, things we can sell. A conference on ‘working history’ seems like an ideal place to challenge that, to think about how we can use digital tools and techniques to expose more of the labour, the craft, the practice of history. To focus on the doing, not the done.

In 2008, the American historian William G Thomas suggested that ‘digital history should embrace the impermanence of the medium, use it to convey the changing nature of the past and of how we understand it’. The digital future is full of clamour and distraction, an overwhelming array of possibilities. Much like the past.

Our experiments, our incomplete thoughts, our works-in-progress, our failures, reflect the confusion and uncertainty we can never escape. By exposing them online, we are simply admitting what we’ve always known. History is constantly in the process of being made.

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.

Presented at the National Digital Forum, 13 October 2015, Wellington.

23andMe is a US-based company that will, for a fee, analyse your genetic ancestry. Provide some saliva and they’ll send you a summary that compares your DNA with 31 identified populations across the world. It seems that this sort of genetic analysis is the next big thing in family history. You may have noticed that Ancestry offers a similar service.

23andMe, however, also provides an Application Programming Interface, or API, so developers can create third party apps that do cool things with your DNA. Don’t worry — you do have to provide permission. Facebook won’t automatically start recommending friends based on your genes. Well… not yet.

But it didn’t take long for the ethical boundaries of this sort of service to be tested. One developer created a Genetic Access Control authentication system. Using it, online sites or services could restrict access to people who had a specific genetic make-up.

The developer’s API access was quickly revoked with 23andMe noting that their terms of use prohibit applications that ‘contain, display or promote hate’.

Four years ago I stood on this stage describing a project I was working on with Kate Bagnall called Invisible Australians. We were (and are) trying to encourage use of the National Archives of Australia’s collection of records that document the workings of the White Australia Policy in confronting detail.

As an experiment I’d downloaded thousands of images from the Archives’ collection database. Most were certificates used in the control of ‘non-white’ immigration — visually compelling documents that include both portrait photographs and handprints.

I ran a facial detection script over the images to extract the portraits and created an online resource we called The Real Face of White Australia. For a weekend project it’s had a significant impact around the digital humanities world.

Some people criticised us because they thought we were selecting records based on race. This was just a misunderstanding of the records and the technology we were using. Even if I’d wanted to, I wouldn’t have had a clue back then about how to categorise portraits by race.

Now I do.

I can sign up for an account with a service like Face++ and use their API to analyse an image of a person’s face to determine both race and gender.

After a bit of a break because of — you know — LIFE, Kate and I are getting back to Invisible Australians. In 2011 I had about 12,000 images from one series in the National Archives. I’ve now harvested almost 160,000 images from 22 series.

But the intervening years have also brought changes in the Australian government’s treatment of asylum seekers, greater power for security agencies, and the normalisation of electronic surveillance.

When the White Australia Policy was implemented, portrait photographs and fingerprints were the latest in crime-fighting technology. Just over a month ago the Australian government announced its ‘newest national security weapon’ — a national facial recognition system to be known henceforth as ‘The Capability’. This system would assist authorities in ‘putting a name to the face of terror suspects, murderers, and armed robbers’.

Tools that help identify faces can offer powerful new means of discovery and analysis within the holdings of our cultural institutions. But can those of use who work with these tools avoid engaging with broader systems of surveillance, categorisation and control? For Kate and me the parallels are too strong — history is not just about the past.

I’m talking today about two related technologies — facial detection and facial recognition.

Facial detection simply tells you if there’s a face in an image. It’s the technology that draws boxes around faces when you’re taking photos and it’s pretty efficient and well established. This is the technology I used to create our wall of faces.

Basic detection is now being supplemented by algorithms that examine the shape of facial features and the characteristics of things like skin to estimate gender, age and race. They can also tell you whether the person is wearing glasses and the quality of their smile.

Facial recognition, on the other hand, first detects faces within an image and then searches for those faces within an existing set of previously identified images. The Capability, for example, plans to take an image and look for matches across a series of interlinked databases, such as passports and driving licences. It’s also what Facebook does when it tags people in photos you share.

Facial recognition is a lot trickier than detection, but last year FaceBook announced that its DeepFace system had reached a level of accuracy similar to humans. Not to be outdone, Google claimed its FaceNet technology had pushed the bar even higher, reporting an accuracy of over 99%. How this translates to real-world applications such as The Capability is not clear, but we can assume that security agencies are heading down the same path.

Machines have struggled to match humans in finding and recognising faces because faces are so important in simply being human. Faces connect us to our social world.

But, as cultural institutions know, faces can also connect us through time. Looking into the eyes of a person, no matter how far removed through history or culture, affects us. We do not merely read, we feel. This, I think, is where The Real Face of White Australia gains its emotional power.

Last year in another experiment I started extracting faces from Trove’s millions of digitised newspaper articles. The images are of a much lower quality than photographs of course, but still… there’s that feeling of connection.

Facial detection is one example of a broader class of computer vision operations known as feature detection. You can train your computer to find all manner of patterns and shapes in your images. This includes cats and bananas, as well the components of a face — eyes, noses and mouths.

So of course I wondered, what would a newspaper discovery interface based on eyes look like?

Eyes on the past has been variously described as both beautiful and creepy — something of which I’m rather proud. It was another weekend project — an experimental intervention rather than a practical tool. By clicking on eyes and faces you can find your way to newspaper articles, but that’s not really the point.

I was hoping to say something about the fragility of our connections to the past — we glimpse past lives through tiny cracks in the walls of time. These moments may be fleeting, but they can also be full of meaning.

So I kept harvesting faces. I’ve now got about 6000 from the 1880s through to 1913. If you’d like to play, the complete set is available for download from Figshare.

I also built my own face API to encourage further experimentation. While services like Face++ have APIs that take your face and pull it apart, mine just gives you random faces from the past. That’s all.

Most recently, I used my collection of faces to create a Twitter bot called the Vintage Face Depot. Tweet a picture of yourself to the bot and it will send you back a new version of yourself, in which your face is overlaid with a random visage from my extensive range of vintage faces.

Tweaking the transparency means the faces start to blend — you are neither yourself, nor them, but someone new. Each face replacement also comes gift wrapped with a link to the original newspaper article.

The Vintage Face Depot tells you nothing about yourself. I built it at about the same time as Microsoft launched their How-Old bot that uses machine learning to estimate your age. Face Depot does nothing clever, and yet sometimes the results are uncanny, even unsettling. Microsoft might be able to tell you how old you are, but Face Depot asks who you are and pushes you in the direction of a past life, linked merely through chance.

Of course the next obvious step is to feed to the results of Vintage Face Depot to the How-Old bot.

Or to Face++’s API.

In a similar vein, the developer Kirk Kaiser has been pitting neural network against neural network — altering images of himself using Google’s DeepDream and uploading them to Facebook for DeepFace to analyse and tag.

Digital artists like Adam Harvey have reverse-engineered facial detection algorithms to devise anti-surveillance fashion styles. He shows how you can use make up to disrupt key regions, such as where your nose and eyes intersect, and render your face invisible. From face to ‘anti-face’.

While none of these interventions provide a detailed critique of state surveillance, they do highlight the constructed nature of these technologies. By fucking with their parameters we understand better how they work.

But what’s the role of cultural heritage organisations in all of this?

Libraries are already leading the way in supporting online privacy. But leaving aside the whole ‘living in a surveillance state’ thing for a moment, these technologies don’t just find faces, they reduce us to a set of external characteristics. We become what they can measure.

Researchers are currently investigating how facial detection systems can be used to identify depression. The aims are worthy of course, but it’s not hard to imagine how, like 23andMe, such systems could be used to discriminate rather than support. Other studies have explored whether human observers can tell if you’re gay or prone to infidelity by looking at your face. Anyone remember phrenology?

With measurement comes the power to categorise and control. These are technologies that enable us to be judged at a distance — to be identified as threat or a sales opportunity just by the way we look.

Facial recognition takes this further — not only can we be reduced to a set of externally-verifiable measurements, but these measurements are assumed to constitute our identity.

Ok, so running Face++’s API across photographic collections to identify pictures of women seems like it could be a useful thing to do. But we also know that the male/female binary is hopelessly inadequate in describing who we are. Identifiers are not the same as identities.

Cultural heritage data is gloriously messy. Even as we try and wrangle it to fit our systems we recognise its resistance as something profoundly human. Against the power of surveillance — both for security and sales — we have the opportunity, the obligation, to celebrate this complexity. To deny the meaning of measurement.

You cannot know me from my face.

My identity cannot be captured in your database.

Let’s use facial detection to enrich our metadata, but let’s also work with artists, developers, and activists to challenge the technology’s embedded assumptions about the ‘perfect face’.

Four years ago I showed you our wall of faces. A few weeks ago I took those 7000 photos and ran them through a program that averaged the facial features.

I expected to be critical. I expected to be annoyed. But instead of seeing some algorithmically-generated nonsense, I just saw a person.

There’s power in that.

I spoke recently at the LODLAM Summit and the New Factual Storytelling Symposium about my latest experiments in developing online historical narratives that embed rich structured data about people, places, events and resources. I also mentioned that there were plans afoot to publish a couple of substantial works using the framework. One of these will be by my partner in crime, Kate Bagnall, and I thought you might like a preview. Coming soon(ish) to a website near you…

James Minahan’s Homecoming

By Kate Bagnall

In 1908 James Minahan arrived in Australia after 26 years in China. Born in Melbourne, as a small boy he was taken by his Chinese father to live in his ancestral village in rural Guangdong to be educated in Chinese. Growing up in China James remembered little of the country of his birth or of his Irish-Australian mother, but Australia was always part of his plans for the future. His father had kept shares in the store he had run on the Indigo goldfields in the 1870s and, as an adult, James planned to return there.

What he found on his arrival in the newly federated Australia, however, was that being born in Australia did not guarantee a right to live there if you were deemed to be Chinese. No longer able to speak the English of his Victorian childhood, James was made to sit the infamous Dictation Test, which he failed. After he was arrested as a prohibited immigrant, the Chinese community rallied around him and began legal proceedings to have him released. James Minahan’s case made it all the way to the High Court of Australia, who ruled in his favour. He was allowed to remain in Australia.

A century later, the High Court’s decision in Potter v. Minahan continues to inform the legal interpretation of what it means to be an Australian. Who is an immigrant? Who is a member of the Australian community? Who belongs? Who doesn’t? In James Minahan’s Homecoming historian Kate Bagnall tells the story behind the Potter v. Minahan High Court case for the first time.

Keynote presented at DH2015, 3 July 2015. Full slides available on SlideShare.

This, you might be surprised to learn, is not the first time that Australia has welcomed some of the world’s leading thinkers to its shores. Just over a hundred years ago, the British Association for the Advancement of Science held its annual meeting in Australia. In earlier years the Association had journeyed to Canada and South Africa, but this was it’s first tour of Australia. One senior Australian scientist heralded the Association’s arrival as ‘a great event in the history of Imperial unity’.

More than 300 scientists made the trip, including such notables as Ernest Rutherford and William Bateson. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that their travel was heavily subsidised by the Federal government. But then, it did take them more than a month to get here. Think about that on your flight home.

The eminent Australian geologist Edgeworth David described the Association’s visit as ‘an epoch making event’. He expected Australian researchers to be ‘strengthened and confirmed’ in their work, reaffirmed through the ‘inspiration which comes alone from personal contact with master minds’.

It was also an occasion to celebrate the ideals of science. War had been declared while the scientists were at sea, but events proceeded nonetheless with delegates barnstorming across the country from Adelaide to Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. The spirit of proceedings was summed up in Melbourne where the presentation of an honorary degree to the German geologist Johannes Walter was greeted with a ‘perfect storm of applause’. ‘Truly science knows not distinction between belligerent and belligerent’, noted one newspaper. Australia’s Governor General, Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, welcomed the scientists with the observation that the looming dangers of war had at least ‘enabled them to realise that all men of science were brothers’.

And of course, they were mostly men.

If you’d like a bit of data around that, you can grab a digitised copy of the report of the meeting from the Internet Archive and run a script over the list of members, grouping them by title – Miss, Mrs and Lady. Here’s what you get.

You can do the same for the people who joined the Association at one of the Australian venues.

Ok, so this 10 minute analysis might not show anything unexpected, but I love the fact that with a digitised text and a few lines of Python I can ask a question and get an almost instant answer.

What the official report doesn’t say is that despite these proclamations of scientific brotherhood, not all German scientists were welcome in wartime Australia. Those who extended their stay beyond the meeting dates fell under suspicion.

Two of them, Fritz Graebner and Peter Pringsheim, were interned as suspected spies and imprisoned for the remainder of the war. The press which had fawned over the travelling savants now railed against these ‘scientists in disguise’ whose ‘supreme act of treachery’ was undoubtedly part of a German plot to capture Australia. The Minister of Defence noted that the case emphasised the ‘real and pressing nature’ of the wartime emergency. Honorary degrees awarded to two German scientists by the University of Adelaide were expunged from the record.

At this point I feel I should warn all our international visitors that legislation introduced in recent years to combat the so-called ‘war on terror’ has added new limits to our freedom of speech and movement. We are all under suspicion.

The German scientists were interned alongside many thousands of others. Most had had no charges brought against them. Many were naturalised British subjects, or Australian-born of German descent. Australia was their home. That didn’t stop the government repatriating many of them to Germany at war’s end.

To orient them on their antipodean adventure, visitors for the British Association meeting were supplied with specially-prepared handbooks that described conditions in Australia. At a time when violence against Indigenous people was still common along the frontiers of settlement, the Commonwealth Handbook informed visitors that Australian Aboriginals ‘represent the most backward race extant’.

Australia was big, but its population was small. The Commonwealth Handbook noted the challenges of maintaining ‘control of so large a territory by a mere handful of people’, pointing to the significance of the ‘White Australia’ policy in avoiding the ‘difficulties’ of ‘heterogenous’ populations. Chris Watson, who served as Australia’s first Labor prime minister a decade earlier, expanded on this theme in the NSW Handbook. Concerns about the financial impact of ‘coloured’ labour, he explained, had been fused with an ‘abhorrence of racial admixture’ to create ‘practically a unanimous demand for a “White Australia”’. ‘White Australia’ was both an ideal and an obligation, an opportunity and a threat. Watson observed:

The aboriginal natives are numerically a negligible quantity, so there is every opportunity for the building up of a great white democracy if the community can maintain possession against the natural desire of the brown and yellow races to participate in the good things to be found in the Commonwealth. That the Asiatic will for ever tamely submit to be excluded from a country which, while presenting golden opportunities, is yet comparatively unpeopled, can hardly be expected. Therefore Australians are realising that to maintain their ideals they must fill their waste spaces and prepare for effective defence.

Welcome to Australia a hundred years later where we remember 1914 not for its institutionalised racism, but because it marked the beginning of a war that has come to be strongly associated with ideas of Australian nationhood.

You have arrived here amidst the ‘Anzac Centenary’ which, the official website notes, ‘is a milestone of special significance to all Australians’. It must be true because, according to the Honest History site, we’re spending more than half a billion dollars on commemorative activities. That’s a lot of remembering.

Amidst the travelling roadshows, the memorials, the exhibitions, and the rolling anniversaries, are of course many worthy digital projects. Some of these will provide new access to war-related collections, or gather community content and memories. They will result in important new historical resources. But who are we remembering and why? As a historian and hacker, as a maker of tools and a scraper of sites, I want today to poke around for a while amidst the complexities of memory.

It’s not all about the war. Recent decades have brought attempts to remember more difficult histories. Peter Read coined the phrase ‘stolen generations’ to draw attention to the devastating effects of official policies that resulted in the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families, through until the 1970s. The damaging experiences of children in institutional care, the ‘forgotten Australians’, have also been opened to scrutiny. Both of these have brought official apologies from the Commonwealth government. Even now, almost every day brings more horrifying testimony as the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse continues its hearings.

In each case we have learnt to our shame of continuing failures to protect the most vulnerable in Australian society – children.

Often these investigations are cast as attempts to bring to the surface forgotten aspects of our history. But to those who suffered through these events, who have continued to live with the consequences, they have never been far from memory.

Nor have they been entirely lost to the historical record. One of the responses to these inquiries has been to discover, marshal and deploy existing archival resources. The National Archives of Australia created an exhibition based on the experiences of some of the Stolen Generation. They also developed a new name index to their collections to help Indigenous people reconnect with their families through official records.

The eScholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne drew on its experience in documenting a wide variety of archival collections to create Find & Connect – a web resource that assembles information about institutional care in Australia and assists care leavers in recovering their own stories. Official records have been supplemented by oral history programs and other collecting initiatives to ensure that these memories are secure.

Such histories are ‘forgotten’ not because they are unremembered or undocumented, but because they sit uncomfortably alongside more widely promulgated visions of Australia’s past. As researchers on the Find & Connect project noted, the stories of care leavers ‘did not “fit in” with the narratives in the public domain. Their memories were “outside discourse”’.1 Remembering the forgotten is not just a matter of recall or rediscovery, but a battle over the boundaries of what matters.

Libraries, archives and museums are often referred to as memory institutions. Rhetorically it can be a useful way of positioning cultural institutions in respect to structures of governance and assessments of public value. The idea of losing our memory, whether as a society or an individual, is frightening.

But there are contradictions here. We frequently talk about memory in terms of storage – the ability of our technologies to tuck away useful pieces of information for retrieval later. There’s the ‘M’ in RAM and ROM, the fields in our database, our backups in the cloud. Memory is an accumulation of key/value pairs. Each time we query a particular key, we expect to get the same value back.

Memory, as we experience it, is something quite different. It’s fragmentary, uncertain, and shaped by context. The process of recall is unpredictable and sometimes disturbing – memories are often triggered involuntarily. Within a society memories are contested and contradictory. Who controls the keys?

Cultural institutions are trying to respond to this complexity. On the one hand they offer the security of authority – sources to be trusted in world overflowing with information. But they are also looking for ways of capturing and representing alternative voices.

I think we can help with that.

Both in my work at Trove and my own noodling about I use the word ‘access’ a lot. But the more I use it the more I suspect it really doesn’t mean very much. What does it say that we now distinguish between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ access?

We tend to think of ‘access’ as the way we get to stuff. It’s the pathway along which we can explore our cultural collections. But as Mitchell Whitelaw argues, one of our primary means of access, the common or garden variety search box, constrains our view of the resources beyond.  Search provides not an open door, but a grumpy ‘Yes, what?’

I’d suggest that these sort of constraints don’t stand in the way of access, they construct it. Through legislation, technology, and professional practice, through the metadata we create and the interfaces we build, limits are created around what we can see and what we can do. Access is a process of control rather than liberation.

In 1952, in another notable act of ‘imperial unity’, Britain exploded an atomic bomb off the coast of Western Australia. A further 11 atomic tests were carried out here, most at a mainland testing site called Maralinga in South Australia. As a young research student in 1984, the British atomic tests introduced me both to the gloriously rich collections of the National Archives of Australia, and to the contradictions of access.

Under the Archives Act, most government records are opened to the public after 20 years (this was reduced from 30 years in 2010). However, before they are released they undergo examination to see whether they contain material that is exempted from public access – for example any secret squirrel business that could endanger our national security. The access process can therefore result in records that are ‘closed’ or ‘open with exception’.

What does ‘closed’ access look like? A few weeks ago I harvested details of all the files in the National Archives’ online database that have the access status ‘closed’. The records include the reasons why the files remain restricted. If you group them by reason, you can see that the most common grounds for restriction is Section 33(1)(g) of the Archives Act which seeks to prevent the ‘unreasonable disclosure of information relating to the personal affairs of any person’. Fair enough. Coming second is the rather less obvious category of ‘withheld pending advice’. These are files that have gone back to the government agencies that created or controlled them to check that they really can be released. So they’re actually part way through the process.

Using the contents dates of the files we can see how old they are. Section 33(1)(a) of the Archives Act exempts records from public scrutiny if they might ‘cause damage to the security, defence or international relations of the Commonwealth’. Most of the records closed on these grounds are over 50 years old, with a peak in 1956.

And here’s a word cloud of the closed file titles from 1956. I’m sure that we all feel a lot safer knowing all those Cold War secrets are still being protected.

Back in 1984 I asked for some of those secret files to be opened so I could write my Honours thesis on the role of Australian scientists in the British Atomic tests. A number of the files I was interested in went off to agencies for advice, and some even made their way to the British High Commission. Being young, optimistic, and on a deadline, I wrote to the British High Commissioner asking if anything could be done to speed the process up.

I received a very polite reply explaining that they were obligated under the Nuclear Non-Profileration Treaty to make sure that they didn’t unleash any atomic bomb secrets upon the world. This was hilariously and tragically ironic, as the argument of my thesis was that the British government withheld information from their Australian hosts to curry favour with the USA. There was no way that atomic bomb plans would be in Australian government files. Yeah – hilarious.

Access is political. Cassie Findlay has contrasted the Australian government’s processes for the release of records with the creation and use of the WikiLeaks Cablegate archive.2 Cassie argues that the ‘hyper-dissemination’ model of WikiLeaks, through which large volumes of material are shared across multiple platforms, creates a ‘pluralised archive’ that ‘exists beyond spatial and temporal boundaries, transcends state and economic controls and encourages and incorporates people’s participation and comment’. Instead of gatekeepers and reading rooms there are hackers and torrents.

Traditional forms of access are often celebrated as if they are a gift to a grateful nation. As Cassie notes, the release of Cabinet documents by the National Archives is a yearly ritual where stories of 30 year old political manoeuvring are mixed with the comforts of nostalgia. But with each release more files are closed, withheld from public access. The workings of a bureaucratic process developed to control the release of information is recast as an opportunity to party. Invested with the cultural power of the secret and the political weight of national security, access itself becomes mysterious and magical.

We are left to ponder such wonders as: ‘Named country [imposed title, original title wholly exempt]’.

At the same time, governments are pumping out ‘open data’, bringing the promise of greater transparency, and new fuel for the engines of innovation. But for all its benefits, open data isn’t. It only exists because decisions have been made about what is valuable to record and to keep – structures have been defined, categories have been closed. As Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Starr remind us, the definition, elaboration and enforcement of categories lies at the heart of bureaucracy and the infrastructure of the state.3 Data is not just a product of government, it is implicated in the workings of power.

Chris Watson’s vision of a White Australia was, by 1914, well established as a system of bureaucratic surveillance and control. The Commonwealth Handbook benignly noted that ‘an immigrant may be required to pass a dictation test before being admitted into the Commonwealth’. It added that ‘in general practice this test is not imposed upon persons of European race’. The dictation test was a mechanism of exclusion. Any intending immigrant deemed not to be ‘white’ would be subjected to the dictation test and they would fail. But there were already many people born or resident in Australia of Asian descent. If they wanted to travel overseas they were forced to carry official documents to protect them from the application of the dictation test – otherwise they might not be allowed to return home. Many thousands of these documents are now preserved in the National Archives of Australia. With portrait photographs and inky-black handprints, they are visually compelling, and disturbing, documents. They need to be seen.

A few years ago, my partner Kate Bagnall and I harvested thousands of these documents from the National Archives website, ran them through a facial detection script and created ‘The Real Face of White Australia’.

You might have seen it before. It’s been widely cited, and it’s probably one of the main reasons I’m standing here today. For Kate and me this was part of our ongoing attempts to use the bureaucratic remnants of the White Australia policy to reconstruct the lives of those who lived within its grasp. But it’s also an example of the complications of access.

In the past I’ve tended to gloss over the hardest part of this project – just harvesting those 12,000 images. It was only possible because I’d spent a lot of time, over a number of years, wrestling with RecordSearch, the National Archives’ online database. I think it was back in 2008 that I wrote my first Zotero translator to extract structured data from RecordSearch. It was one of those Eureka moments. Although I’d been developing web applications for a long time, I hadn’t really thought of the web as a source to be mined, manipulated and transformed. I could take what was delivered in my browser and change it.

Thanks to the Bill Turkel and the Programming Historian, I taught myself enough Python to be dangerous and was soon creating screen scrapers for a variety of sites – taking their HTML and turning it into data. I was no longer bound to a particular interface. The meaning of access had changed.

But screen scrapers are a pain. Sites change and scrapers break. I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent inspecting RecordSearch response headers, trying to figure out where my requests were going. I’ve given up several times, but always gone back, because there’s always more to do.

Amongst the enthusiasm for open data there’s perhaps a tendency to overlook the opening of data – the way that hackers, tinkerers, journalists, activists and others have been stretching the limits of access.

The various projects of the Open Australia Foundation are a great example of this – they’ve even established their own public scraping framework called Morph, to share both the code and the data that’s been liberated from websites and pdfs.

The Australian Parliament recently passed changes to the Copyright Act that will enable copyright holders to apply to the Federal Court to block piracy-related websites. Of all the changes needed to copyright, this is the one that went to Parliament.

But what I love is that even before the legislation had passed, even before the first application has been made or site blocked, there was a website and Twitter account ready to document and publicise any site-blocking orders – created not by government, but by an ABC journalist.

Archivists Wendy Duff and Verne Harris have talked about records ‘as always in the process of being made’, not locked in the past but ‘opening out of the future’.4 Cassie Findlay similarly notes that the Cablegate archive ‘is still forming’. She argues for models of participation and access around archives that open ‘more directly from the affairs that they document’.

The act of opening – records, archives, sources – is contingent and contextual. It creates a connection between inside and outside, past and present, us and them. What we do with that connection is up to us.

What would have happened if instead of hearing about ‘prohibited immigrants’, instead of seeing ‘wanted’ posters of escaped Chinese seaman, Australians in 1914 had seen something like our wall of faces?

What would happen now if instead of hearing about ‘illegal maritime arrivals’ (IMAs) we were exposed to the stories of those who arrive in Australia in search of asylum?

Access will never be open. Every CSV is an expression of power, every API is an argument. While I would gladly take back the time I’ve spent wresting data from HTML I recognise the value of the struggle. The bureaucratic structures of the White Australia policy live on in the descriptive hierarchies of the National Archives. To build our wall of faces we had to dismantle these structures – to drill down through series, items, documents and images until we found the people inside. I feel differently about the records because of that. Access can never simply be given, at some level it has to be taken.

In 1987 I ended up outside the gates of Pine Gap, a US intelligence facility near Alice Springs, dressed as a kangaroo. Having finished my honours thesis on the British atomic tests, I couldn’t ignore the parallels between the bombs and the bases. I even organised a conference entitled, ‘From Maralinga to Pine Gap: The historical fallout’. I remember pulling over on the road to Alice Springs because there was one point where you could just glimpse the top of one of the white domes that protected Pine Gap’s receivers. It was a pretty thrilling moment.

Now you can just type ‘Pine Gap’ into Google Maps and there it is.

It’s still secret, it’s still gathering unknown quantities of electronic intelligence, but last time I checked it also had 21 reviews and an average rating of 3.6 stars. Keep it in mind for your next Aussie holiday!

Digital tools enable us to see things differently – to demystify the secret, to expose patterns and trends locked up in tables, statistics, or cultural collections.

Mapping Police Violence, for example, displays your chances of being killed by police in the US based on your location. It also presents the photos and details of more than 100 unarmed black people killed by police in 2014.

@CongressEdits is a Twitter bot, created by Ed Summers, that tweets anonymous edits to Wikipedia made within the US Congress. A similar bot exists for Australian state and federal governments.

I love the way that Twitter bots, in particular, can play around with our ideas of context and significance. I’ve created a few myself that automatically tweet content from Trove, and I’m interested in what happens when we mobilise cultural collections and let them loose in the places where people already congregate. Steve Lubar argues that ‘the randomness of the museumbot calls attention to the choices that we take for granted’. Twitter bots can challenge the sense of control and authority that adhere to our collection databases.

But bots can be more. Mark Sample’s important essay on ‘bots of conviction’ explores the possibilities for protest and intervention. He describes protest bots as ‘tactical media’ creating ‘messy moments that destabilise narratives, perspectives, and events’. Wendy Duff and Verne Harris warn archivists of the dangers of the story in disguising the exercise of power, in stealing from individuals what they need to construct their own narratives – ‘space, confusion, [and] a sense of meaninglessness’. Against the brutal logic of the state, a bot’s algorithmic nonsense can help us to see differently, to feel differently.

Caleb McDaniel’s bot @Every3Minutes is an example of how powerful these interventions can be. Working from estimates of the volume of the slave trade in the American South, it tweets a reminder every three minutes – a person was just traded, a child was just bought – often with links to historical sources. Mark Sample notes that ‘it is in the aggregate that a protest bot’s tweets attain power’ and it is through simple, unyielding repetition that @Every3Minutes reaches us. As Alex Madrigal noted: ‘To follow this bot is to agree to reweave the horrors of slavery into the fabric of your life’.

My own protest bot is trivial by comparison to Mark or Caleb’s work. @OperationBot merely assembles random words to create new names for national security operations. It’s a bot born of frustration and fury as the Australian government responded to the plight of asylum seekers by launching ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’. As @OperationBot proudly proclaims, its aim is to ‘protect Australia from meaning’.

Perhaps more significant than @OperationBot’s supposed subversions is the fact that I could create it in a couple of hours sitting in front of the TV. Digital skills and tools allow us to try things, to create and experiment, without any expectation of significance or impact.

One of the more controversial sessions at the British Association meeting in Australia in 1914 was devoted to the structure of the atom. Ernest Rutherford reported on experiments that pointed to the now familiar model where the atom’s mass is concentrated in a tiny, central nucleus. Firing charged particles at a thin sheet of gold foil, Rutherford, Geiger and Marsden had expected the particles to pass through largely undeflected. But some bounced back. As Rutherford later noted: ‘It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you’.

I wonder if that’s what we’re doing – firing off experiments into the net, waiting for one to hit something solid and bounce back. PING!

@Every3Minutes – PING!

The Real Face of White Australia – PING!

In 2012 Kate and I received an email from Mayu Kanamori, an artist researching the life of an early Japanese Australian photographer. She described her reaction to the Real Face of White Australia:

When I scrolled down the Faces section of your website, browsing through the faces, tears welled up, and I couldn’t stop crying as if some sort of flood gates had been removed.

We knew that that the documents and the images were powerful, but displaying the faces on that seemingly endless scrolling wall did something more than we were expecting.

Jenny Edkins has been exploring the politics of faces, and she suggests that alongside our attempts to ‘read’ portrait photographs we also respond in a more visceral fashion, provoking responses such as ‘guilt, obligation, and reciprocity’.5 Like the ‘messy moments’ of protest bots, she argues that the connections we make through photos of faces can disrupt the ‘linear narrative temporality’ on which sovereign power depends. We are connected through time, not with history, not with the past, but with people. And that has implications.

Last year I tried extracting faces, and eyes within those faces, from photos I’d harvested via Trove’s digitised newspapers. The result was Eyes on the Past. It presents a random selection of eyes, slowly blinking on and off. Clicking on an eye reveals the full face and the source of the image. Where the Real Face of White Australia overwhelms with scale and meaning, Eyes on the Past is minimal and mysterious. Eyes on the Past emphasises absence, and the fragility of our connection with the past, even while it provides a new way of exploring the digitised newspapers. Perhaps the best thing about it is the range of responses it has provoked – from those who found it beautiful, to those who thought it was just creepy.

More recently I’ve been playing around with the possibility of connection, and creepiness, through The Vintage Face Depot. Tweet a photo of yourself to @FaceDepot and a bot will select a face at random from my collection of newspaper images and superimpose that face over yours – tweeting you back the result. It sounds stupid, and it probably is. I’m still waiting for it to go viral like Microsoft’s age detection thing. But sometimes… PING!

One night I started fiddling with the transparency of the superimposed images. All of a sudden I could see the colour of my face showing through. I could see my glasses on this face from the past.

Experimenting on Kate, I saw the blue of her eyes peering through eyes of another person. Again, the potential is there to mess around with the barriers that put some people on the other side of this wall we call the past – to explore what Devon Elliot suggested on Twitter was an ‘uncanny temporal valley’.

The Australian historian Greg Dening has argued:

Nothing can be returned to the past. Not life to its dead. Not justice to its victimised. But we take something from the past with our hindsighted clarity. That which we take we can return. We disempower the people of the past when we rob them of their present moments.

There is no open access to the past. There is no key we can enter to recall a life. I do this sort of stuff not because I want to contribute to some form of national memory, but because I want to unsettle what it means to remember – to go beyond the listing of names and the cataloguing of files to develop modes of access that are confusing, challenging, inspiring, uncomfortable and sometimes creepy.

Perhaps my favourite experiments are a couple of simple userscripts. They sit in your browser and change the behaviour of Trove and RecordSearch.

Instead of pulling faces out of documents, they put them back in. Instead of seeing lists of search results, you see the people inside. Like the faces on our wall the people bubble up though the interfaces. They are present.

Despite the apparent enthusiasm for the visit of the British Association in 1914, there was in Australia a lingering suspicion of scientists as ‘impractical dreamers’, as mere theorists unwilling to address the nation’s most urgent needs. In debates over the application of knowledge to Australian development, the scientist commonly battled it out against the supposed virtues of the ‘practical man’.

I imagine my grandfather, Henry Sherratt, was a practical man. He was a brass moulder with a workshop in Brunswick, a suburb of Melbourne. His father and brother, both brass workers, lived and laboured nearby. I have a small brass ashtray that Henry made.

Henry’s name isn’t amongst those who joined the British Association in Melbourne, though perhaps he attended one of the ‘Public or Citizens Lectures’ which, until the 1911 meeting, had been known as ‘Lectures for the Operative Classes’. Neither is Henry’s name amongst those who journeyed to the battlefields of Europe and the Middle East. He is not one of those honoured by the Anzac Centenary for having ‘served our country and worn our nation’s uniform’. And yet he went to war.

Henry Sherratt was amongst a select group of tradesmen who travelled to Britain in 1916 to help meet the desperate need for skilled workers in munitions factories. He worked as a foreman brass moulder in Scotland, before an accident in which he ‘strained his heart’ carrying a ladle of molten iron. He never really recovered and as his income suffered, so did his family at home. Henry finally returned in 1919 and was offered £50 compensation with no admission of liability. He died in 1955. I never knew him.

Who do we remember and why?

The Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics reported that 159 people died as a result of industrial accidents in 1914. But these were only the accidents that had been reported under the provisions of state legislation. There must have been more. Where is their memorial? What about mothers who died in childbirth, or victims of domestic violence? How do we remember them?

At a recent workshop organised by Europeana, Lucy Delap described how her project to historicise child sex abuse in 20th century Britain was making use of digitised newspapers. As well as documenting individual cases, the researchers hope to create ‘a map of change over time in the reporting of child sexual abuse’ that would enable them to test theories about how different organisations respond to abuse.

In the week that the British Association met in Melbourne, newspapers tell us that David Phillips, an engine driver, was fatally injured at Flinders Street Station. I’m thinking about how we might use Trove’s digitised newspapers to collect the stories of those who went off to work, but never returned. What might we learn about economic history, unionism, industrial legislation – about the value we place on an individual life?

As I’ve often said in regard to our work on the White Australia records – it just seems too important not to try.

As I was writing this talk I was also keeping an eye on my harvesting scripts which were chugging away, pulling down more images from the National Archives. For the original wall of faces I downloaded about 12,000 images from one series, I’ve now got more than 150,000 from about 10 series. You’ll see more of that soon.

As I was writing this talk I stopped at various times to play around with code – to look at the gender balance at the British Association, to investigate ‘closed’ files in the National Archives, to create a public Face API for anyone to use. The code and apps are all out there now for you to play with or improve.

Writing, making, thinking, playing, sharing. It all happens together. I’m a maker like my grandfather. While he poured metal I cut code. I do it because I want to find ways to connect with people like him, ordinary people living their lives. Those connections will always be fleeting and fragile, lacking the certainty of commemoration, but hopefully bearing some of the meaning and complexity of memory.

It’s a task that needs to be both playful and political. It’s not about making things, but trying to make a difference.

Permalink

http://discontents.com.au/unremembering-the-forgotten/

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1536150

Internet Archive

https://web.archive.org/web/20150905062506/http://discontents.com.au/unremembering-the-forgotten

GitHub

https://github.com/wragge/discontents-blog/blob/master/_posts/2015-07-03-unremembering-the-forgotten.md

1. Shurlee Swain, Leonie Sheedy, and Cate O’Neill, ‘Responding to “Forgotten Australians”: historians and the legacy of out-of-home “care”’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, 1 March 2012, pp. 17–28. <doi:10.1080/14443058.2011.646283>
2. Cassie Findlay, ‘People, records and power: what archives can learn from WikiLeaks’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 41, no. 1, 2013, pp. 7–22. <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01576895.2013.779926>
3. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences, MIT Press, 2000.
4. Wendy M Duff and Verne Harris, ‘Stories and names: Archival description as narrating records and constructing meanings’, Archival Science, vol. 2, 2002, pp. 263–85.
5. Jenny Edkins, Face Politics, Routledge, 2015.

This is the published version of my chapter ‘Asking better questions: History, Trove and the risks that count’ in the book CopyFight, edited by Phillipa McGuiness. It’s reproduced here with the permission of the publishers.

You can buy a copy of the book from NewSouth Press or just about any bookstore. You can also download a pdf version of this chapter.

A few years ago historian Kate Bagnall and I created ‘The real face of White Australia’. In 1901 the Immigration Restriction Act gave legislative force to a system of racial exclusion and control that came to be known as the White Australia Policy. The bureaucratic remnants of this system survive today in the National Archives of Australia. But how can we find them? How can we see them? Our online experiment brings some of these lives, previously deemed out of place in a ‘white’ Australia, to the surface. Instead of documents, files or search results, all you see are faces – a continuous, scrolling wall displaying thousands of faces. It’s compelling, challenging and discomfiting. Some viewers were brought to tears.

The faces come from portrait photographs that were attached to official certificates. If non-white residents wanted to travel overseas, they needed special identity documents. Without them they could be refused entry on their return. They would not be allowed to come home. On the front of each certificate are photographs and basic biographical details, on the back is a palm print. Many thousands of these documents are preserved in the archives.

To extract the faces I reverse-engineered the National Archives’ online database to automatically harvest images of the documents. From just one series or group of records, I downloaded more than 12,000 images. Then I tinkered with some facial detection code until I was able to find and crop out the portraits. I ended up with 7000 faces – just a sample of the archives’ holdings, but enough.

The whole thing was a quick experiment, mostly completed over the space of a weekend, but its influence has been widely felt. The project has been cited in discussions around race, archives, visualisation and serendipitous discovery. It has been assigned for student reflection in university courses around the world and is regularly held up as an example of what the digital humanities has to offer. But whenever I give a talk about it in Australia, one question seems inevitably to arise – what is the copyright status of the images?

In a keynote address to New Zealand’s National Digital Forum in 2011, library technologist Michael Lascarides challenged those of us who work with digital cultural collections to ‘ask better questions’. When confronted with the remains of our racist history, when looking into the eyes of people whose lives were monitored and controlled by the government because of the colour of their skin, why should we feel compelled to consider the technicalities of copyright?

Surely there are better questions to ask?

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I describe myself as a cultural data-hacker, but my business hours are currently spent on the other side of the fence, as the manager of Trove at the National Library of Australia.Trove is a discovery service that makes Australian resources easier to find and use. It’s a collection of collections, bringing together the holdings of many libraries, archives, museums, universities, government agencies and more. The most heavily used part of Trove is an ever-growing collection of digitised newspapers – the full text of more than 130 million articles documenting Australian history from 1803 onwards.

It’s hard to measure the cultural impact of Trove’s digitised newspapers. Technologies like optical character recognition (OCR) and keyword searching are now commonplace, but apply them to 150 years of Australian history and something transformative happens. Easy access to historical newspapers is changing our relationship with the past.

It’s not just about convenience – the ability to do your research at home in your pyjamas – although the significance of opening access to rural and remote communities across a large country like Australia shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s also about using the granularity of newspapers to expose the local, the particular, the personal and the ephemeral – glimpses of ordinary lives otherwise unrecorded.

Kate is a historian of Chinese Australia, interested in intimate relationships between Chinese men and white women. The people she studies often lived at the fringes of society and their lives can be difficult to recover. But searching across digitised newspapers she can find shards and fragments, stories of love and loss, full of the vivid, turbulent detail of everyday life. Each shard helps to build a bigger picture, a different view of Australian society and history.

Other researchers have mined the newspapers in pursuit of topics as diverse as invasive species, climate change, poetry and legal history. These uses will multiply as the corpus grows and our tools develop. Like a big telescope or a particle accelerator, digitised newspapers support large-scale fundamental research across a range of disciplines. Old papers have become a site for the creation of new knowledge.

But digitised newspapers are not solely the province of professional researchers. The size and diversity of their content support almost any interest, feed almost any passion. I recently harvested a sample of articles from the web that include links to Trove’s newspapers – 3116 webpages containing 13,389 links. We know that family and local historians make heavy use of the newspapers and their efforts are well represented in my sample. But there was more – sport, war, science, politics, architecture, music, art… from popular entertainment to academic treatises, from hateful diatribes to thoughtful reflections, they were all there.

More surprising than just the range of topics, styles and prejudices is the different ways the newspapers are used online. In 2013, for example, the local media in Western Australia reported on Cockburn City Council’s plan to erect a shark barrier at Coogee Beach. When one councillor expressed doubts, noting the lack of ‘serious or fatal shark attacks at Coogee Beach since records commenced in the 1800s’, a reader could quickly challenge her comments by citing two Trove newspaper articles that documented local attacks. References to the digitised newspapers are embedded online not just within narratives or compilations, but as commentary and debate. Trove provides a ready source of evidence to test historical claims without lengthy research or the mediation of experts.

Easy accessibility is helping to break down the otherness of the past, allowing it to be mobilised in contemporary discussions. New conversations between past and present are emerging around the digitised newspapers. Trove has launched us upon a massive ongoing experiment in collaborative meaning-making.
And it might never have happened.

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Years before I was given the job as Trove manager, I was poking and prodding at the interface, trying to extract useful data to use in new applications, and generally making a nuisance of myself. Among the tools I created was QueryPic, a simple way of visualising newspaper searches. It’s been through several versions but the principle remains constant – just feed in your search query and QueryPic will create a line chart showing you the number of newspaper articles per year that match your query.

QueryPic is well used and has even been cited in scholarly articles, but I think its greatest value is as an example of what becomes possible when you make large quantities of cultural content available in digital form. Instead of the normal list of search results, QueryPic shows you trends and patterns. You can observe changes in language, the rise and fall of our cultural obsessions or the impact of major events. When did the ‘Great War’ become the ‘First World War’? Is that jolly Christmas visitor called ‘Father Christmas’ or ‘Santa Claus’? QueryPic helps you see things differently.

One of the most dramatic and unexpected patterns revealed by QueryPic is that Australian history ends in 1954. Who would have guessed? With very few exceptions, Trove’s collection of digitised newspapers comes to an abrupt halt in 1954, when the possibilities of the digital age meet the realities of copyright. You want to trace cultural patterns beyond 31 December 1954? Sorry, you’re out of luck.

Why 1954? We’re currently about halfway through the great AUSFTA culture drought. On 1 January 2005, the Australia–US Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) extended the standard period of copyright protection from fifty to seventy years and changed the way photographs are treated. We might have to wait until 2025 before Trove’s newspapers can start edging forward, year by year, beyond 1954.

But it’s even more complicated than that, as there’s no certainty that newspaper articles published before 1955 are out of copyright. To be sure, the National Library would have to investigate any named authors to confirm they all died before 1955. That’s simply impossible in a mass digitisation project. Instead the library weighed the copyright risks against the cultural benefit and decided to proceed. If the library had been more cautious, if the risks or uncertainties had seemed too great, Trove would have no digitised newspapers. And we would all be poorer.

These types of judgements are made all the time by cultural organisations wanting to open online access to their collections. Libraries, archives and museums are full of so-called ‘orphan’ works, whose creators cannot be identified or located. There’s no risk-free way of making this content available online.

But these risks are not only assessed and managed, they’re passed on to users, who must themselves try and navigate the thicket of copyright law. As use of online collections moves beyond traditional forms of citation into new types of digital aggregation, analysis and annotation, the doubts and complexities accumulate. The price of innovation is increased risk. The only safe course is to do nothing.

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Why do we put cultural heritage collections online? Is it for the sake of efficiency, preservation, marketing or perhaps an informed citizenry? Usually we fall back on fuzzy notions of ‘engagement’ or ‘access’. More access is good, particularly if we can measure it easily through web stats.

Recently we surveyed Trove users to gain a broad picture of satisfaction and use. One finding in particular keeps me coming into work each day – 90 per cent of our general users agreed with the statement ‘Trove has made me interested in learning and discovering more’. Access can’t simply be measured in collection images or web-page hits. What we’re creating is an enlarged space for reflection, research, learning, creativity and critique. We’re enabling people to do more, with more.

Trove is not alone. Around the world, projects such as Europeana, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and Digital New Zealand all work to open our collected cultural heritage to new forms of use. Europeana, in particular, has drawn on its research into the value and impact of online collections to proclaim a wonderfully ambitious agenda. Their aim is to ‘transform lives’ – to unlock Europe’s cultural heritage, enabling it to act as a ‘catalyst for social and economic change’.

Resisting Europeana’s efforts to ‘transform the world with culture’ are an array of different copyright regimes across Europe. Advocacy on behalf of the very idea of ‘openness’ is crucial to the success of their mission. But it’s never simply a matter of law.

Our cultural collections contain many resources that are already free of copyright restrictions, but it’s not always easy to find them. A lack of clear identification can stymie reuse as effectively as copyright restrictions – it’s not enough to share the resources, organisations also need to share licensing information so that open content can be easily discovered across collections. Sometimes institutional requirements for permission are weighed upon public domain resources, fostering doubt in place of certainty. Wherever copyright lingers, rights statements bloom in astonishing diversity. The DPLA estimates that there are more than 26,000 different rights statements attached to items in their aggregated collection. How are users expected to know what they’re allowed to do?

The complexity of copyright fosters confusion and uncertainty beyond the reach of mere law. It’s not just legislation that has to change.

Recently Dan Cohen, the Executive Director of the DPLA, argued that the licensing of cultural data should address more than just legal and technical issues. Instead of seeking to enforce acknowledgement of the source of the data through licence conditions, the DPLA wants to push discussion of attribution and reuse ‘into the social or ethical realm’ by ‘pairing a permissive license with a strong moral entreaty’. Instead of a statement about legal constraints, we have the opportunity for a conversation about what matters and why.

It might not figure in our web stats, but the National Library has plenty of anecdotal evidence that Trove changes lives – a grandfather’s face glimpsed for the first time, or perhaps a family mystery solved. One man, who grew up in care, found through Trove the only known photograph of himself as a child. How do we weigh such opportunities against questions of ownership and control?

We need to shift the discussion away from the nature of property to the value of use. What do we want to do? Online culture is read–write. We do not simply consume – we share, we remix, we curate and create. Increased participation brings new opportunities for understanding. Do we give them flight or lock them down?

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One of the main sources of traffic to Trove, up there with Facebook and Wikipedia, is the knitting site Ravelry. Why? Because Ravelry users have found and shared hundreds of craft patterns from Trove’s digitised newspapers. And not just shared, but made. The most popular pattern, ‘Elegant elephant’, discovered in a 1959 edition of the Australian Women’s Weekly, has been made more than forty times, often with individual embellishments.

This to me seems a great example of the wonderful complexities that the digitisation of cultural heritage collections are introducing into our relationship with the past. A digital version of a fifty-year-old pattern is shared online and spawns a herd of cuddly elephants. From past to present, from digital to physical, the transformations pile one on top of another.

It’s also unexpected. It’s not a use that was designed into the system, it’s a new set of experiences brought to life through the passions and ingenuity of Trove users.

The application of digital tools to large cultural collections also promises to surprise. Techniques drawn from computational linguistics, for example, are being used to analyse the spread of ideas through nineteenth-century newspapers. Another project is using computer vision to identify poems in newspapers through their distinctive shapes. New structures can be found and visualised within digitised sources. New questions can be asked.

But these techniques also carry new risks. Researchers in the digital humanities, exploring the application of technology to fields such as literature and history, have been prominent in discussions around the copyright implications of mass digitisation projects and the legal status of text-mining. Increased clarity around concepts such as ‘transformative use’ is necessary to ensure that researchers have access to data and the confidence to explore.

And yet the ultimate goal isn’t certainty, it’s a greater awareness of the constraints around our engagement with the past. Within both government and the cultural sector the value of ‘open’ data is rightly proclaimed, but open data is always, to some extent, closed. Categories have been assigned, formats have been cleaned, deci- sions made about what belongs and what doesn’t – every spreadsheet contains an argument.

Each elephant is different. The tensions imposed by our overly complex system of copyright do at least remind us that the past can never be ‘open’, its limits cannot be legislated, its boundaries cannot be fixed. Beneath questions of access and use are better questions about our responsibilities to the past.

©©©©©

I’ll admit that part of my discomfort in being questioned about the copyright status of ‘The real face of White Australia’ stemmed from my ignorance. I just didn’t know the answer.

I’m still not sure.

I do know now that photographs taken before 1955 are okay. But these were attached to official forms, so perhaps the government owns the copyright. Are they published? I suspect the only way to be certain would be to seek permission from the current government department with responsibility for … what exactly? The White Australia Policy lives on, its workings preserved within the archives.

I’ll admit too that I always thought it would be interesting if some part of the government challenged our use of the documents. What exactly would they be claiming ownership of?

‘The real face of White Australia’ was motivated by a strong sense of responsibility towards those people whose lives are glimpsed through the records. To me the question of responsibility still seems more important than the intricacies of ownership. Our debts are to the people who confront us with their gaze, who defy the legislation that told them they did not belong.

Copyright law will never be able to make these judgements for us. No system can predict the individual ethical calculations that shape our engagement with the past. We may always be confronted with risks.

The word ‘access’ itself is full of politics. To what? By whom? When it comes to our cultural heritage we should never be satisfied. We must ask about the silences and the gaps. We must challenge the definitions. Access can never simply be given, to some extent it has to be taken. In the struggle we will find meaning.

There must always be risks. The point is to make the risks count.

Keynote presented at the Annual Conference of the Japanese Association for the Digital Humanities, 20 September 2014, Tsukuba.

The full set of slides is available on SlideShare.

Cross-published on Medium.

This is Tatsuzo Nakata. In 1913 he was living on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, just off the northern tip of Australia.

From the late 19th century there was a substantial Japanese population on Thursday Island, mostly associated with the development of the pearling industry.

I’ll admit that I know very little about Tatsuzo, and I’ve selected him more or less at random from a large body of records held by the National Archives of Australia.

I present him here out of context and in too little detail, simply as an example. Working backwards from this photograph I want to restore some layers of context and reveal to you a complex and shameful history.

This photograph was attached to an official government form called a ‘Certificate Exempting From Dictation Test’.

From the form we learn that the 32 year-old Tatsuzo was born in Wakayama. He had a scar over his right eye.

Tatsuzo carried a copy of this form with him when he departed for Japan aboard the Yawata Maru in May 1913. When he returned the following year the form was collected and compared with a duplicate held by port officials. The forms matched, and Tatsuzo was allowed to disembark.

To help confirm his identity, the form carried on its reverse side an impression of Tatsuzo’s hand.

You might think that this was a travel document — an early form of visa perhaps. But at the top of the form you’ll notice a reference to the Immigration Restriction Act, a piece of legislation introduced by the newly-federated Australian nation in 1901. The Immigration Restriction Act and the complex bureaucratic procedures that supported its administration came to be known more generally as the White Australia Policy.

If Tatsuzo had tried to return to Australia without one of these forms, he would have been subjected to the Dictation Test, and he would have failed. Despite its benign-sounding name, the Dictation Test was a form of racial exclusion aimed at anyone deemed non-white. No-one was meant to pass. If he hadn’t carried this form exempting him from the Dictation Test, Tatsuzo would most likely have been denied re-entry.

This certificate is drawn from one of more than 14,000 files in Series J2483 in the National Archives of Australia. This series is solely concerned with the administration of the White Australia Policy. There are many other series from other ports and other time periods full of documents like this. The National Archives holds many, many thousands of these certificates documenting the lives and movements of people considered out of place in a White Australia.

Photographs, forms, files, series, legislation — this small shard of Tatsuzo’s life is preserved as part of a racist system of exclusion and control. But what happens when we extract the photos from their context within the recordkeeping system and simply present them as people?

I’ve created a site where you can explore some of the records relating to Japanese people held in Series J2483. Instead of navigating lists of files, you can start with faces — with the people, not the system.

I’m starting today with Tatsuzo and this wall of faces because what I want to explore are some of the complexities of context.

Shark Attack!

After a series of fatal shark attacks in Australian waters, the community of Port Hacking, in southern Sydney, began to wonder if they too were at risk.

In January 2014 the local newspaper published an article under the heading ‘Shark “cover up” in Port Hacking’ alleging that research into the dangers had been suppressed.

Ten days later the newspaper followed up with details of the area’s only recorded fatal shark attack in 1927. A local government member, it reported, had ‘unearthed the article on Trove’.

‘It’s long been a story that a boy was killed by a shark at Grays Point many years ago’, he said, ‘I knew about it 30 to 40 years ago but if you talk to people around here, nobody knows about it’.

‘A lot of people say there are no sharks in Port Hacking but this is rubbish’, he added.

Let me reassure anyone thinking about coming to DH2015 in Sydney next year that shark attacks are extremely rare.

What interested me about these articles was not the risk of gruesome death, but the relationship between past and present. The question of whether shark attacks were possible could be answered — simply by searching Trove.

Trove

For those who don’t know, Trove is a discovery service developed and maintained by the National Library of Australia. Like Europeana, the Digital Public Library of America, and DigitalNZ, it aggregates resources from the cultural heritage sector, and beyond.

It also provides access to more than 130 million newspaper articles from 1803 onwards. The articles are drawn from over 600 different titles — large and small, rural and metropolitan — with more are being added all the time.

Search for just about anything and you’re likely to find a match of some sort amongst the digitised newspapers. So of course I searched for Tsukuba…

Trove is also a community. Users correct the OCR’d text of newspaper articles. They also add thousands of tags and comments to resources across Trove.

• 138,000 users
• 3,000,000 tags
• 80,000 comments
• 139,000,000 corrections
• 58,000 lists

Perhaps my favourite example of user-generated content on Trove are the Lists. Lists are pretty much what they sound like — collections of resources. They make it easy for you to save and share your research. But more than tags or comments they expose people’s interests and passions. They give some insight into the many acts of meaning-making that occur in and around Trove.

Lists are also exposed through Trove’s Application Programming Interface (API) in a form fit for machine consumption. So with just a dash of code I can harvest the titles of all public lists and do some very basic word frequency analysis courtesy of Voyant Tools.

There’s nothing too surprising here — we know that family historians are our largest user group. But we can also see the long tail in action — the way that huge collections like Trove can support very focused, specific interests.

Which leads me back to shark attacks.

Old Speak

The Port Hacking article made me wonder how many other web pages there might be out on the wider web that cited Trove newspapers in a discussion of shark attacks. The answer was many. But what was most interesting wasn’t the volume of references, it was the variety of contexts — in blog posts, on Facebook, in fishing forums.

‘Ahh, old time newspapers are fascinating things aren’t they?’, notes one post in a weather forum, citing details of a shark attack in Sydney from 1952.

On a fishing site, a thread on bull shark attacks in Western Australia’s Swan River begins: ‘I found a great website to view really old newspapers in perth. Just found a few swan river shark storys [sic]…’.

The author follows up with a direct link to the Trove search page, prompting the exchange:

Redfin 4 Life: ‘Haha you would never know there had been that many incedents in the swan without seeing these…’

Goodz: ‘Oh how newspapers have changed the way the write… love the old speak!’

Alan James: ‘That’s right Goodz, and more often than not I’m sure they actually reported the truth.’

So a discussion of shark attacks turns to a consideration of the changing style of newspaper reporting.

Perhaps even more interesting is the way that digitised newspapers are used to test a hypothesis, challenge an interpretation, or argue a case. As in the Port Hacking case, questions about the history of shark attacks can be explored without needing to turn to experts, history books, or official statistics.

So when a local politician is quoted as saying ‘there have not been any serious or fatal shark attacks at Coogee Beach since records commenced in the 1800s’, a reader can respond with two Trove newspaper citations and the comment: ‘No previous shark attacks? Or are they only searching for fatalities?’

When a media outlet asks its Facebook followers whether the export of live sheep from Western Australia might be increasing the number of shark attacks off the coast, one follower can simply share a Trove link to a newspaper article from 1950 and ask ‘Did they have live sheep export in 1950?’

I don’t want to argue that these interactions are particularly profound or remarkable. In fact I’d suggest that they’re interesting because they’re not remarkable. 130 million digitised newspaper articles chronicling 150 years of Australian history are just another resource woven into the fabric of online experience. The past can be mobilised, shared and embedded in our daily interactions as easily as pictures of cats.

Traces

And it’s not just shark attacks. To explore the variety of contexts in which Trove newspaper articles are used and shared, I started mining backlinks.

Backlinks, as the name suggests, are just links out there on the wild, wild web that point back to your site. You can find them in your referrer logs, in Google’s webmaster tools, or simply by searching. I started with a ‘try before you buy’ sample of backlinks from an SEO service.

From there I wrote a script to harvest the linking pages, remove duplicates, extract the newspaper references, retrieve the article details from the Trove API, and save everything to a database for easy exploration. You can play with the results online.

I ended up harvesting 3116 pages from 1780 domains containing 13,389 links to 11,242 articles in Trove. Remember that’s just a sample of all the links to Trove newspapers out there on the web.

What was more surprising than the raw numbers was the diversity of content across those pages. I knew that family and local historians were busily blogging about their Trove discoveries, but I didn’t know that Trove newspapers were being cited in discussions about politics, science, war, sport, music — just about any topic you could imagine.

Nor are these discussions just about Australia. A little quick and dirty analysis suggests that more than 30 languages are represented across those 3000 pages.

This is a work in progress. I hope to expand my hunt for traces — crawling sites for additional references, mining referrals, and inviting the public to nominate pages for inclusion. By adding a simple API I could make it possible for Trove to include links back to relevant pages, like trackbacks on a blog. I also want to understand more about the scope of the content and the motivations of its authors. What is going on here?

Undoubtedly some of these pages constitute link spam or attempts to game search engines, but most do not. Browsing the database you find many examples of interpretation, persistence, and passion. People around the world have something they want to say, something they want to share, and Trove’s millions of newspaper articles provide them with a readily-accessible source of inspiration and evidence.

It’s clear that those many small acts of meaning-making we can observe in Trove’s activity statistics extend beyond a single site — to a much much wider (and wilder) world.

Scale

One day earlier this year, Trove received more than three times its usual number of visitors.

The culprit was the WTF subreddit — a popular place for sharing the weirdities of the web. Someone posted a link to a Trove newspaper article describing the unfortunate demise of a poodle called Cachi, whose fall from a thirteenth-story balcony in Buenos Aires resulted in the deaths of three passers-by.

As well as causing a dramatic spike in Trove’s visitor stats, the post received more than 3000 votes and attracted 677 comments on reddit. Cachi was a hit.

Trove articles pop up regularly on reddit. The traffic spikes they bring are reminders that however proud we might be of our stats, we are but a tiny corner of the web. There’s something much bigger out there.

Michael Peter Edson has long sought to alert cultural heritage organisations to the challenges of scale. In a recent essay he described the web’s ‘dark matter’:

There’s just an enormous, humongous, gigantic audience out there connected to the Internet that is starving for authenticity, ideas, and meaning. We’re so accustomed to the scale of attention that we get from visitation to bricks-and-mortar buildings that it’s difficult to understand how big the Internet is—and how much attention, curiosity, and creativity a couple of billion people can have.

Libraries, archives and museums, he argues, need to meet the public where they are, to recognise that vigorous sites of meaning-making are scattered across the vast terrain of the web. Trove newspaper traces and reddit spikes are mere glimpses of the ‘dark matter’ of cultural activity that lurks beneath the apps, the stats, and the corporate hype.

People are already using our digital stuff in ways we don’t expect. The question is whether libraries, archives and museums see this hunger for connection as an invitation or a threat. Do we join the party, or call the police to complain about the noise?

Sharing

There’s something fundamentally human about sharing. Yes, it’s easy to mock the shallowness of a Facebook ‘Like’; to see our obsession with followers, friends and retweets as evidence of our dwindling capacity for attention — reducing engagement and understanding to a single click. But haven’t we always shared — through stories, gossip, jokes, performances, and rituals? Rather than being measured against a threshold of meaning, surely each act of sharing exists on a continuum from the flippant to the philosophical. Just because the act of sharing has been commodified by large social media services seeking to mine our preferences for profit, doesn’t mean it lacks deeper human significance.

A retweet can represent a fleeting interest, a brief moment of distraction. But it can also mark the start of a journey.

Cultural heritage institutions around the world have begun to recognise that sharing is not just a marketing strategy, it’s a mission. As Merete Sanderhoff notes in her foreword to the anthology Sharing is Caring:

When cultural heritage is digital, open and shareable, it becomes common property, something that is right at hand every day. It becomes a part of us.

Aggregation services, like Trove, the Digital Public Library of America, Europeana, and DigitalNZ, bring resources together to share them more easily with the world. Aggregation is only worthwhile if it serves discovery and reuse — it’s a process of mobilisation, rather than collection. As Europeana argues in their 2020 strategy:

We believe culture is a catalyst for social and economic change. But that’s only possible if it’s readily usable and easily accessible for people to build with, build on and share.

Of course the hard part is understanding what makes something ‘readily usable and easily accessible’. What balance do we need between push and pull? Between ease-of-use and technical power? Between licensing and liberty? Between context and creativity?

Busy Bots

The Mechanical Curator was born in the British Library Labs as part of their innovative digital scholarship program. In September 2013, she started posting to Tumblr random images automatically extracted from a collection of 65,000 digitised 19th century books.

It was, Ben O’Steen explained, an experiment in ‘providing undirected engagement with the British Library’s digital content’. The book illustrations moved from inside to outside, opening opportunities for discovery beyond the covers.

But that was just the beginning. A few months later the Mechanical Curator dramatically expanded its labours, uploading more than a million public domain images to Flickr.

What followed was something of a cultural feeding frenzy as people from all over the world starting sharing, tagging, collecting, and creating with this rich assortment of 19th century illustrations. Since then the images have been mashed up into new works, added and organised in the Wikimedia Commons, and featured in an installation at the Burning Man festival in Nevada.

Having been locked away within books for more than a hundred years, the illustrations were given new life online as works in their own right. Opportunities for innovation and expression were created by a rupture in context.

Meanwhile on Twitter, a growing army of bots was liberating items from cultural collections around the world. Inspired by the bot-making genius of Mark Sample, I created @TroveNewsBot in June 2013 to tweet newspaper articles from Trove.

He was joined by @DPLABot, @EuropeanaBot, @Kasparbot, @CurtinLibBot, @DigitalNZ.bot, @museumbot, @cooperhewittbot, @bklynmuseumbot, and no doubt others — all sharing random collection items. Of course @MechCuratorBot soon joined the fray from the British Library, and I eventually added @Trovebot to tweet material from all the non-newspapery sections of Trove.

The possibilities of serendipitous discovery are receiving increasing attention within the digital humanities. At DH2014, Kim Martin and Anabel Quan-Haase critically examined four DH tools — including @TroveNewsBot — in the light of existing models of serendipity. Their discussion noted that randomness is not the same as serendipity, and outlined how serendipity could be understood as type of encounter with information. I do wonder though if what makes the bots interesting is not randomness as such, but the way randomness can play around with our assumptions about context.

Steve Lubar observes that the random offerings of collection bots can also expose the choices that are made in the creation and display of cultural collections. Randomness can challenge our expectations. Describing the genesis of the Mechanical Curator, James Baker notes:

And so as what at first seemed simple descends into complexity the Mechanical Curator achieves her peculiar aim: giving knowledge with one hand, carpet bombing the foundations of that knowledge with the other.

The Trove bots I created do more than tweet random offerings, they also allow you to interact with Trove without ever leaving Twitter. Send a few keywords their way and they’ll do your searching for you, tweeting back the most relevant result. You can modify their default behaviour by adding a series of hashtags — #luckydip, for example, will spice your result with a touch of randomness.

More interestingly, perhaps, you can tweet a url at them and they’ll extract keywords from the web page and use them to construct the search. This means that @TroveNewsBot can offer commentary on current events.

Several times a day he retrieves the latest headlines from a news site and searches for something similar amidst Trove’s 130 million historical newspaper articles. What emerges is a strange conversation between past and present.

These bots do not simply present collection items outside of the familiar context of discovery interfaces or online exhibitions, they move the encounter itself into a wholly new space. Just as the Mechanical Curator liberates illustrations from the printed page, the Twitter bots loosen the institutional context of collections to allow them to participate in a space where people already congregate. They send collection items out into the wilds of the web, to find new meanings, new connections and perhaps even new love.

Broken & Repaired

But letting go can be scary. A 2008 survey of libraries, archives and museums revealed that one of the main factors inhibiting the opening up of online collections was the desire to avoid misrepresentation, mislabeling or misuse of cultural objects. Easy sharing brings the risk that our carefully curated content will be shorn of context and bounced around the web — adrift and abused.

Earlier this year Sarah Werner took aim at Twitter feeds that pump out streams of ‘historical’ photos — unattributed and often wrongly captioned. But it wasn’t simply the lack of attribution that angered her:

These accounts capitalize on a notion that history is nothing more than superficial glimpses of some vaguely defined time before ours, one that exists for us to look at and exclaim over and move on from without worrying about what it means and whether it happened.

I have to admit that the excitement of seeing Trove’s visitor numbers suddenly soar thanks to reddit is frequently tempered by the realisation that what is being shared is yet another story of gruesome death, violence, or misfortune. 150 years of Australian history is reduced to clickbait by our tabloid sensibilities. Most of those who arrive from reddit read the article and click away — the bounce rate is around 97%. This is not ‘engagement’?

And yet, I can’t help but wonder about the 3% who don’t immediately leave, who pause and look around. Three percent of a lot is still a lot — a lot of people who might have been exposed to Trove and Australian history for the very first time. Similarly while the viral pics industry is frustrating and exploitative, it might yet offer opportunities to learn.

One of my favourite Twitter accounts is @PicsPedant. It monitors many of the viral pics feeds, researches the images, and tweets the results — providing a steady stream of attributions, corrections, critiques, and context. Not only do you find out about the images, you pick up research tips, and learn about the cannibalistic tendencies of the pic bots themselves — constantly recycling content from their kin.

@AhistoricalPics offers a different form of education, satirising the whole viral pics genre with its fabricated captions, and pricking at our own inclination to believe.

Freeing collections opens them to misuse, but it also exposes that misuse to analysis and critique. Contexts can be rediscovered as well as lost, restored as well as broken.

Generous signposts

It’s wonderful to see many Trove newspaper articles shared on Twitter. Unfortunately a significant proportion of these come from climate change deniers, who mine the newspapers for freak weather events and past climatic theories, imagining that such reports undermine current research. This is bad science and bad history. Their efforts are also well-represented in my database of web page citations, along with expressions of hatred and prejudice that I’d prefer to stay submerged. It’s depressing, but it seems inevitable that people will do bad things with your stuff.

In a recent post about the DPLA’s metadata licensing arrangements, Dan Cohen suggested we should look beyond technical and legal controls around online use towards social and ethical guidelines:

The cynics, of course, will say that bad actors will do bad things with all that open data. But here’s the thing about the open web: bad actors will do bad things, regardless… The flip side of worries about bad actors is that we underestimate the number of good actors doing the right thing.

Bad people will do bad things, but by asserting a social and ethical framework for the use of digital cultural collections we strengthen the resolve and commitment of those who want to do right.

Already there are examples in the work of the Local Contexts project which is developing a series of licenses and labels to guide use of traditional knowledge and cultural materials. Similarly, Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand have been developing an Indigenous Knowledge Notice to educate the public about what constitutes appropriate use.

We should remember too that footnotes have always been at the heart of an ethical pact. The Australian historian Tom Griffiths has described footnotes as ‘honest expressions of vulnerability’ — ‘generous signposts to anyone who wants to retrace the path and test the insights’. This ‘professional paraphernalia’ has, he argues, grown out of a series of ethical questions:

To whom are we responsible – to the people in our stories, to our sources, to our informants, to our readers and audiences, to the integrity of the past itself? How do we pay our respects, allow for dissent, accommodate complexity, distinguish between our voice and those of our characters?1

Such questions remain crucial as we consider the relationship between cultural collections and their online users. If we expect people to erect ‘generous signposts’ we have to make our stuff easy to find and share. If we want them to consider their responsibility to the past we should focus on providing trust, confidence, and support, not permission.

Responsibilities

If my wall of faces seems seems familiar, it might be because a few years ago I created something similar called The Real Face of White Australia.

The two walls use different sets of records, but they were constructed in much the same way: I reverse-engineered the National Archives’ online database, downloaded images of digitised files, and used a facial detection script to identify and extract faces.

The Real Face of White Australia was an experiment, built over the course of a weekend. But its discomfiting power was immediately evident. Where there had been records, there were people — looking at us, challenging us.

My partner Kate Bagnall is a historian of Chinese-Australia and we were working together on a project called Invisible Australians, aimed at liberating the lives of these people from the bureaucracy of the White Australia Policy.

The project was motivated by a strong sense of responsibility — not to the National Archives, not to the records, but to the people themselves.

We often talk about preserving context as if it’s an end in itself; as if context is just a set of attributes to be catalogued and controlled. The exciting, terrifying, wonderful thing about the wild, wild web is how it upsets our notions of relevance and meaning. Historic newspapers can find their way into contemporary debates. Century-old illustrations can be remade as art. Twitter bots can inspire conversations with collections. The people buried inside a recordkeeping system can be brought at last to the surface. Contexts are unstable, shifting. And through that instability we can glimpse other worlds, we can imagine alternatives, we can build something new.

What’s important is not training users to understand the context of our collections, but helping them explore and understand their responsibilities to the pasts those collections represent.

Let’s remove technical barriers, minimise legal restrictions, and trust in the good will of our audiences. Instead of building shrines to our descriptive methodologies, let’s create systems that provide stable shareable anchors, that connect, but don’t constrain.

Contexts will flow and mingle, some will fade and some will burn. Contexts will survive not because we demand it in our terms of service, or embed them in our interfaces, but because they capture something that matters.

The ways we find and use cultural collections will continue to change, but questions about responsibility, value, and meaning will remain.

1. Tom Griffiths, ‘History and the creative imagination’, History Australia, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2009.

This is the text of my keynote address to the Digisam conference on Open Heritage Data in the Nordic Region held in Malmö on 25 April 2013. You can also view the video and slides of my talk, or experience the full interactive experience by playing around with my text/presentation in all its LOD-powered glory. (Use a decent browser.)

The Australian poet and writer Edwin James Brady and his family lived for many years in the isolation of far eastern Victoria — in a little town called Mallacoota.

Here, from time to time, Brady amused himself by taking a map of Australia down from the wall and sticking pins in it. The pins, Brady explained in 1938, included labels such as ‘Hydro-electric supply base’, ‘Irrigation area, and ‘Area for tropical settlement’. The map and its pins were one expression of Brady’s life-long obsession with Australia’s potential for development — for progress.

Maps and pins are probably more familiar now than they were in Brady’s time. We use them routinely for sharing our location, for plotting our travel, for finding the nearest restaurant. Maps and pins are one way that we document, understand and express our relationship to space.

Brady, however, was interested in using his pins to highlight possibilities. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries size mattered. With the nations of Europe jostling for land and colonial possessions, space become an index of power. When the Australian colonies came together in 1901 to form a nation, maps and spatial calculations abounded. Australia was big and so it’s future was filled with promise.

In his travels around Australia, EJ Brady started to catalogue ways in which its vast, ’empty’ spaces might be turned to productive use. A hardy yeomanry armed with the latest science could transform these so-called ‘wastes’, and Brady was determined to bring these opportunities to the attention of the world.

This evangelical crusade reached its high point in 1918, with the publication of his huge compendium, Australia Unlimited — 1139 pages of ‘Romance History Facts & Figures’.

Space may no longer be invested with the same sense of swelling power, but our maps and pins still figure in calculations of progress. Now it is the data itself that awaits exploitation. Our carefully plotted movements, preferences and passions may well have value to governments, planners or advertisers. Data, according to some financial pundits, ‘is the new oil’.

Whereas Brady traveled the land documenting its untapped riches, we can take his work and life and mine it for data — looking for new patterns and possibilities for analysis.

Brady wasn’t the first to use the phrase ‘Australia Unlimited’, though he did much to make it familiar. By exploring the huge collection of digitised newspapers available through the National Library of Australia’s discovery service, Trove, we can track the phrase through time.

Brady was a skilled self-publicist and his research trips in 1912 were eagerly reported by the local press such as the Barrier Miner in Broken Hill and the Cairns Post.

In 1918 the book was published, receiving a generally positive reception — as an advertising leaflet showed, even King George V thought the book was ‘of special interest’. In 1926, a copy of the book was presented to a visiting delegation from Japan.

Over the years Brady sought to build on his modest successes, planning a variety of new editions and even a movie. But while his hopes were thwarted, the phrase itself lived on.

In 1938 and 1952, there are references to a radio program called ‘Australia Unlimited’, apparently featuring young musical artists. Also in 1952 came the news that the author of Australia Unlimited, EJ Brady, had died in Mallacoota at the age of 83.

Unfortunately copyright restrictions bring this analysis to a rather unnatural end in 1954. If we were able to follow it through until the present, we could see that from 1957 the phrase was used by a leading daily newspaper as the title of an annual advertising supplement detailing Australia’s possibilities for development. In 1958, it was adopted as a campaign slogan by Australia’s main Conservative party. In 1999 it was resurrected again by a major media company for a political and business symposium. Even now it provides the focus for a ‘branding’ initiative supported by the federal government.

Graphs like this are pretty easy to interpret, but of course we should always ask how they were made. In this case I simply harvested the number of matching search results from the Trove newspaper database for each year. The tool I built to do this has been through several different versions and is now a freely-accessible web application called QueryPic. Anyone can quickly and easily create this sort of analysis just by entering a few keywords.

QueryPic is one product of my experiments with the newspaper database over the last couple of years. I’ve also looked at changes to content of front pages, I’ve created a combination discovery interface and fridge poetry generator, and I’ve even built a simple game called Headline Roulette — which I’m told is strangely addictive.

All of these tools and experiments take advantage of Trove’s API. I think it’s important to note that the delivery of cultural heritage resources in a machine-readable form, whether through a custom API or as Linked Open Data, provides more than just improved access or possibilities for aggregation. It opens those resources to transformation. It empowers us to move beyond ‘discovery’ as a mode of interaction to analyse, extract, visualise and play.

Using freely available tools we can extract named entities from a text, we can look for topic clusters across a collection of documents, we can find places and pin them to a map. With a little bit of code I can take the newspaper reports of Brady’s travels in 1912 and map them. With a bit more time I could take another of Brady’s travel books, River Rovers, available in digitised form through the Internet Archive, and plot his journey along Australia’s longest river, the Murray.

Such transformations help us see resources in different ways — we can find new patterns, new problems, new questions. But transformation is a lossy business. I can put a pin in a map to show that Brady stopped off in Mildura on his voyage along the Murray. What is much harder to represent are the emotions that surrounded that visit. While he was there Brady received news of a friend’s death. ‘Bad news makes hateful the most pleasant place of abiding’, he wrote mournfully, ‘I strained to open the gate to go forth again into a wilderness of salt bush and sere sand’. Travel can be a form of escape.

Digital humanist and designer Johanna Drucker has written about the problems of representing the human experience of time and space using existing digital tools. ‘If I am anxious’, she notes, ‘spatial and temporal dimensions are distinctly different than when I am not’. We do not experience our journeys in a straightforward linear fashion — as the accumulation of metres and minutes. We invest each footstep with associations and meanings, with hopes for the future and memories of the past. Drucker calls on humanities scholars to articulate these complexities and work towards the development of new techniques for modelling and visualising our data.1

‘If human beings matter, in their individual and collective existence, not as data points in the management of statistical information, but as persons living actual lives, then finding ways to represent them within the digital environment is important.’2

In a similar way, Australia Unlimited is not just a catalogue of potentialities, or a passionate plea for national progress. It’s also the story of a struggling poet trying to find some way of supporting his family. Proceeds from the book enabled Brady to buy a plot of land in Mallacoota and build a modest home — I suspect that it wasn’t the same home that was painted by his wife in the 1950s.

But even this small success was undermined. Distribution of the book was beset with difficulties and disappointments and and despite all his plans financial security remained elusive.

Brady’s youngest daughter, Edna June, was born to his third wife Florence in 1946. What could he leave he leave her? A ‘modern edition’ of Australia Unlimited lay completed but unpublished. ‘If it fails to find a publisher’, he remarked wistfully, ‘the MSS will be a liberal education for her after she has outgrown her father’s nonsense rhymes’. It was, he pondered, ‘a sort of heritage’.

One of the things I love about being a historian is that the more we focus in on the past the more complicated it gets. People don’t always do what we expect them to, and that’s both infuriating and wonderful.

Likewise, while we often have to clean up or ‘normalise’ cultural heritage data in order to do things with it, we should value its intrinsic messiness as a reminder that it is shot through with history. Invested with the complexities of human experience it resists our attempts at reduction, and that too is both infuriating and wonderful.

The glories of messiness challenge the extractive metaphors that often characterise our use of digital data. We’re not merely digging or mining or drilling for oil, because each journey into the data offers new possibilities — our horizons are opened, because our categories refuse to be closed. These are journeys of enrichment, interpretation and creation, not extraction.

We’re putting stuff back, not taking it out.

Cultural institutions have an exciting opportunity to help us work with this messiness. The challenge is not just to pump out data, anyone can do that. The challenge is to enrich the contexts within which we meet this data — to help us embrace nuance and uncertainty; to prevent us from taking the categories we use for granted.

For all it’s exuberant optimism, a current of fear ran through Australia Unlimited. The publisher’s prospectus boldly announced that it was a ‘Book with a Mission’. ‘A mere handful of White People’, perched uncomfortably near Asia’s ‘teeming centres of population’, could not expect to maintain unchallenged ownership of the continent and its potential riches. Australia’s survival as a white nation depended upon ‘Effective Occupation’, secured by a dramatic increase in population and the development of its vast, empty lands — ‘The Hour of Action is Now!’.

In 1901, one of the first acts of the newly-established nation of Australia was to introduce legislation designed to keep the country ‘white’. Restrictions on immigration, administered through a complex bureaucratic system, formed the basis of what became known as the White Australia Policy.

While the legislation was designed to keep non-white people out, an increase of the white population was seen as essential to strengthen security and legitimise Australia’s claim to the continent. Australia Unlimited was an exercise in national advertising aimed at filling the unsettling emptiness with sturdy, white settlers.

But White Australia always a myth. As well as the indigenous population there were, in 1901, many thousands of people classified as non-white living in Australia. They came from China, India, Indonesia, Turkey and elsewhere. A growing number had been born in Australia. They were building lives, making families and contributing to the community.

Here are some of them…

I built this wall of faces using records held by the National Archives of Australia. If a non-white person resident in Australia wanted to travel overseas they needed to carry special documents. Without them they could be prevented from re-entering the country — from coming home. Many, many thousands of these documents are preserved within the National Archives.

Kate Bagnall, a historian of Chinese-Australia, and I are exploring ways of exposing these records through an online project called Invisible Australians.

To build the wall I downloaded about 12,000 images from the Archives’ website — representing just a fraction of one series relating to the administration of the White Australia Policy. Unfortunately there’s no machine-readable access to this data, so I had to resort to cruder means — reverse-engineering interfaces and screen-scraping.

Once I had the images I ran them through a facial detection script to find and crop out the portraits. What we ended up with was a different way of accessing those records — an interface that brings the people to the front; an interface which is compelling, discomfiting, and often moving.

The wall of faces also raises interesting questions about context. Some people might be concerned by the loss of context when images are presented in this way, although each portrait is linked back to the document it was derived from, and to the Archive’s own collection database. What is more important, I think, are the contexts that are gained.

If you’re viewing digitised files on the National Archives’ own website, you can only do so one page at a time. Each document is separate and isolated. What changes when you can see the whole of the file at once? I’ve built another tool that lets you do just that with any digitised file in the Archives’ collection. You see the whole as well as the parts. You have a sense of the physical and conceptual shape of the file.

In the case of the wall of faces, bringing the images together, from across files, helps us understand the scale of the White Australia Policy and how it impacted on the lives of individuals and communities. These were not isolated cases, these were thousands of ordinary people caught up in the workings of a vast bureaucratic system. The shift of context wrought by these digital manipulations allows us to see, and to feel, something quite different.

And we can go the other way. In another experiment I created a userscript to insert faces back into Archives’ website. A userscript is just a little bit of code that rewrites web pages as they load in your browser. In this case the script grabs images relating to the files that you’re looking at from Invisible Australians.

So instead of this typical view of search results.

You see something quite different.

Instead of just the record metadata for an individual item, you see that there are people inside.

We also have to remember that the original context of these records was the administration of a system of racial surveillance and exclusion. The Archives preserves not only the records, but the recordkeeping systems that were used to monitor people’s movements. The remnants of that power adhere to the descriptive framework. There is power in the definition of categories and the elaboration of significance.

Thinking about this I came across Wendy Duff and Verne Harris’s call to develop ‘liberatory standards’ for archival description. Standards, like categories, are useful. They enable us to share information and integrate systems. But standards also embody power. How can we take advantage of the cooperative utility of standards while remaining attuned to the workings of power?

A liberatory descriptive standard, Duff and Harris argue: ‘would posit the record as always in the process of being made, the record opening out of the future. Such a standard would not seek to affirm the keeping of something already made. It would seek to affirm a process of open-ended making and re-making’.3

‘Holes would be created to allow the power to pour out.’

‘Making and re-making’ — sounds a lot like the open data credo of ‘re-use and re-mix’ doesn’t it? I think it’s important to carry these sorts of discussions about power over into the broader realm of open data. After all, open data must always, to some extent, be closed. Categories have been determined, data has been normalised, decisions made about what is significant and why. There is power embedded in every CSV file, arguments in every API.

This is inevitable. There is no neutral position. All we can do is encourage re-use of the data, recognising that every such use represents an opening out into new contexts and meanings. Beyond questions of access or format, data starts to become open through its use. In Duff and Harris’s words, we should see open data ‘as always in the process of being made’.

What this means for cultural institutions is that the sharing of open data is not just about letting people create new apps or interfaces. It’s about letting people create new meanings. We should be encouraging them to use our APIs and LOD to poke holes in our assumptions to let the power pour out.

There’s no magic formula for this beyond, perhaps, building confidence and creating opportunities. But I do think that Linked Open Data offers interesting possibilities as a framework for collaboration and contestation — for making and challenging meanings.

We tend to think about Linked Open Data as a way of publishing — of pushing our data out. But in fact the production and consumption of Linked Open Data are closely entwined. The links in our data come from re-using identifiers and vocabularies that others have developed. The linked data cloud grows through a process of give and take, by many small acts of creation and consumption.

There’s no reason why that process should be confined to cultural institutions, government departments, business, or research organisations. Linked Open Data enables any individual to talk about what’s important to them, while embedding their thoughts, collections, passions or obsessions within a global conversation. By sharing identifiers and vocabularies we create a platform for communication. Anyone can join in.

So, if we want people to engage with our data, perhaps we need to encourage them to create their own.

I’ve just been working on a project with the Mosman public library in Sydney aimed at gathering information about the experiences of local servicepeople during World War One. There are many such projects happening around the world at the moment, but I think ours is interesting in a couple of ways. The first is a strong emphasis on linking things up.

The are records relating to Australian service people available through the National Archives, the Australian War Memorial, and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, but there are currently no links between these databases. I’ve created a series of screen scrapers that allow structured data to be easily extracted from these sources. That means that people can, for the first time, search across all these databases in one hit. It’s a very simple tool that I started coding to ease the boredom of a long bus trip — but it has proved remarkably popular with family historians.

Once you’ve found entries in these databases, you can just cut and paste the URL into a form on the Mosman website and a script will retrieve the relevant data and attach it to the record of the the person you’re interested in. Linking to a service record in the National Archives, for example, will automatically create entries for the person’s birthplace and next-of-kin.

The process of linking builds structures, and these structures will themselves all be available as Linked Open Data. Even more exciting is that the links will not only be between the holdings of cultural institutions. The stories, memories, photographs and documents that people contribute will also be connected, providing personal annotations on the official record.

None of this is particularly hard, it’s just about getting the basics right. Remembering that structure matters and that links can have meaning. It’s also about recognising that ‘crowd sourcing’ or user-generated content can be made anywhere. Using Linked Open Data people can attach meanings to your stuff without visiting your website. Through the process of give and take, creation and consumption, we can build layers of description, elaboration, and significance across the web.

What excites me most about open cultural data is not the possibility of shiny new apps or collection visualisations, but the possibility of doing old things better. The possibility of reimagining the humble footnote, for example, as a re-usable container of structured contextual data — as a form of distributed collection description. The possibility of developing new forms of publication that immerse text and narrative within a rich contextual soup brewed from the holdings of cultural institutions.

I want every online book or article to be a portal. I want every blog or social media site to be a collection interface.

What might this look like? Perhaps something like this presentation.

My slides today are embedded within a HTML document that incorporates all sorts of extra goodies. The full text of my talk is here, and as you scroll through it you’ll see more information about the people, places and resources I mention pop up in the sidebar. Alternatively you can explore just the people or the resources, looking at the connections between them and the contexts in which they’re mentioned within my text.

This is part of an ongoing interest to explore different ways of presenting historical narrative, that build a relationship between the text and the structured data that underlies the story.

All of the structured data is available in machine-readable form as RDF — it is, in itself, a source of LOD. In fact the interface is built using an assortment of JavaScript libraries that read the RDF into a little temporary triplestore, and then query it to create the different views. So the whole thing is really powered by LOD.

It’s still very much an experiment, but I think it raises some interesting possibilities for thinking about how we might consume and create LOD simply by doing what we’ve always done — telling stories.

EJ Brady’s dreams were never realised. Australia’s vast spaces remained largely empty, and the poet continued to wrestle with personal and financial disappointment. ‘After nearly eight decades association with the man’, Brady wrote of himself in 1949, ‘I have come to look upon him as the most successful failure in literary history’. This energetic booster of Australia’s potentialities was well aware of his own life’s mocking irony. ‘He has not… made the wages of a wharf laborer out of book writing yet he persists in asserting Australia is the best country in the world!’.

But still Brady continued to add pins to his map.’For half a century I’ve been heaping up notes, reports, clippings, pamphlets, etc. on… all phases of the country’s life and development’. ‘What in hell I accumulate such stuff for I don’t know’, he complained in 1947. As the elderly man surveyed the ‘bomb blasted pile of rubbish’ strewn about his writing tent, he admitted that ‘this collecting is a sort of mania’.

Brady’s map and pins told a complex story of hope and disappointment, of confidence and fear. A story that combined national progress with an individual’s attempts merely to live.

There are stories in our data too — complex and contradictory stories full of emotion and drama, disappointment and achievement, violence and love. Let’s find ways to tell those stories.

1. Johanna Drucker, ‘Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship’, in Matthew K. Gold (ed.), Debates in the Digital Humanities, University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
2. Johanna Drucker, ‘Representation and the digital environment: Essential challenges for humanists’, University of Minnesota Press Blog, http://www.uminnpressblog.com/2012/05/representation-and-digital-environment.html
3. Wendy M. Duff and Verne Harris, ‘Stories and Names: Archival Description as Narrating Records and Constructing Meanings’, Archival Science, vol. 2, 2002, pp. 263–285.

I recently gave a presentation in the Institute of Historical Research’s Digital History Seminar series. The time difference between London and Canberra was a bit of a challenge, so I pre-recorded the presentation and then sat in my own Twitter backchannel while it played. For the full podcast information go to HistorySPOT. You can also play with my slides or peruse the #dhist Twitter archive.

Exposing the Archives of White Australia from History SPOT on Vimeo.