twitter – discontents http://discontents.com.au working for the triumph of content over form, ideas over control, people over systems Mon, 13 Sep 2021 04:34:08 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.17 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 90077936 #Borderfarce, building, and a hacker’s reward http://discontents.com.au/borderfarce-building-and-a-hackers-reward/ http://discontents.com.au/borderfarce-building-and-a-hackers-reward/#comments Mon, 07 Sep 2015 06:35:12 +0000 http://discontents.com.au/?p=2619

Presented at the National Scholarly Communications Forum, Canberra, 7 September 2015.

About 10 days ago I was part of what the Australian described as a ‘frenzy of hyperbole, hysteria and straightforward misinformation’ as Twitter responded to Border Force’s plans to patrol the streets of Melbourne in a crackdown on visa fraud.

Like many others I responded to the announcement with anger, sadness, and disbelief. Was this what we had become?

But the agency’s actions also generated well-deserved ridicule as the hashtag #borderfarce quickly gained ground.

Some months ago, in the wake of ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’, I created a Twitter bot and web app that generate random operation names. Their professed aim is to ‘protect Australia from meaning’. So of course, Operation Random Words quickly leapt into the fray in support of Border Force.

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More pointedly, I shared a slide from my recent keynote at the international digital humanities conference where I drew a connection between the Immigration Department’s use of the term ‘illegal maritime arrivals’ and the category of ‘prohibited immigrants’ employed under the White Australia Policy. Then and now.

It’s probably worth pointing out that this was easy because I’d posted the full text on my talk online within a hour of delivering it in July.

Of course I wasn’t the only one pointing out historical connections. Evan Smith, from Flinders University, issued a steady stream of tweets that linked to literature on immigration and the control of borders.

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Kate Bagnall, a historian of Chinese Australia, noted further parallels with the actions of Customs officers enforcing the White Australia Policy. I shared Kate’s article about one legitimate resident’s arrest by Customs officers suspicious that he seemed a little too Chinese.

For those venturing onto the streets of Melbourne, I helpfully offered a source of suitable identity papers – linking to a test interface Kate and I are building to help navigate through many thousands of documents relating to the White Australia Policy that we’ve harvested from the National Archives of Australia’s online database.

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Ok, so none of these activities had any significant impact on the unfolding of events – although one of Evan’s tweets did make it into a summary of the social media frenzy published by the Sydney Morning Herald. The historical and political dimensions of the debacle were clearly laid out by Mark Finnane in an article for The Conversation a few days later.

But the sense of immediacy was compelling. Something was happening, and we were part of it. The digital tools at our disposal give us the opportunity to mobilise scholarly research and resources and make them available within existing social spaces, in the context of daily events. Communication can come in the form of rapid, pointed, small-scale, ephemeral interventions.

Just the day before Border Farce I realised that an article had been published in Australian Historical Studies that makes heavy use of an online tool I created. QueryPic visualises search queries within the massive collections of digitised newspapers available through Trove and Papers Past. It’s simple, but surprisingly useful.

I created the first version of QueryPic in 2011 and it’s been through several incarnations since. It’s been developed without any sort of institutional support or funding. I built it because I was interested in exploring and encouraging new ways of working with large digitised collections – and I thought others might find it useful.

QueryPic has been cited in other publications, but I was still pretty excited to see it pop up in Australian Historical Studies. What was disappointing, however, was that while all manner of other scholarly works were fully cited, QueryPic was without an author.

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I don’t know if this was a matter of style or merely an oversight, but it does reflect the way that many digital projects are treated. Anyone who’s created a complex historical database, or designed a tool for historical analysis, knows that there are many judgements to be made, models to be constructed, concepts to be defined and tested. And yet this work is often thought to support, rather than constitute, research.

My own research practice is framed around building. By creating tools, resources, interfaces, visualisations, artworks and games, I pursue questions about our relationship with the past. As in any research, I’m frequently surprised by the results. I do this in public because communication and use are central to my practice, even though it doesn’t necessarily result in conventional research outputs.

Of course I’m not alone in this. Just last week the American Historical Association appointed a Digital History Working Group to advise institutions on how they should recognise and reward digital work. This follows the release of a set of guidelines for the evaluation of digital scholarship in history. The guidelines assert:

Work done by historians using digital methodologies or media for research, pedagogy, or communication should be evaluated for hiring, promotion, and tenure on its scholarly merit and the contribution that work makes to the discipline through research, teaching, or service.

I suppose it should be obvious, but recognition and reward are still often linked to specific forms of scholarly production. Why shouldn’t the design, management and completion of a large complex digital project be seen as the equivalent of a book? As the guidelines note, use of digital technologies can challenge the nature of what we do. It’s not just a matter of fiddling with the boundaries, but also reconsidering the shape and structure of academic disciplines and the values that maintain them.

The digital humanities community has strong links with the Open Access and Open Source software movements, demonstrated through its commitment to sharing. From code to courses, publications to project management, follow a bunch of digital humanists on Twitter and you’ll see a constant exchange of ideas and resources. It’s a commitment to openness, but it’s also an expression of scholarly solidarity and commitment. It’s something that guides my own engagement with the academic community and beyond.

Just this week I shared some code and data relating to publicly available ASIO files held by the National Archives of Australia. I’ve harvested the metadata of nearly 12,000 files and downloaded almost 300,000 page images. BorderFarce highlighted historical connections across immigration surveillance and control, and I’m keen to see what structures and patterns emerge from large-scale analysis of both the ASIO and White Australia files.

But why keep it all to myself? The metadata is all available from my GitHub site and if you have 70gb free I can share the images as well. I’d like to try and build an informal research network, not just mine the data for publications.

My bio used to say that I was a ‘digital historian’. I’ve changed that recently to just ‘historian and hacker’ because it’s the approach rather than any specific technology that’s most important to me. The hacker ethos is collaborative, critical and constructive. It’s about diving in and trying to make things better. I want to develop a framework that supports other hackers – to help them build careers, pursue their ideas, manage their risks, and be recognised as scholars.

Those of us privileged to have some measure of security and recognition should help create safe spaces for experimentation in content, methodology and disciplinary formation. As the AHA guidelines note, it’s a shared responsibility – one that is expressed through many routine acts of review, assessment, or advice.

I want a scholarly practice that has room for the angry and the weird alongside the rigorous and detached. That sees in digital technologies not just the chance to crunch huge quantities of data, but the opportunity to tinker with our preconceptions, to be playful and political, to explore emotions as well as evidence, to create bots as well as books.

It might only seem like a tweet, a zip file or a blog post, but in a world that offers us #borderfarce, each small intervention carries with it an opportunity to pursue scholarly practice beyond traditional boundaries, and create something different. I think that’s an opportunity we should nurture.

]]> http://discontents.com.au/borderfarce-building-and-a-hackers-reward/feed/ 11 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 2619 8 months on http://discontents.com.au/8-months-on/ http://discontents.com.au/8-months-on/#comments Mon, 23 Dec 2013 13:10:43 +0000 http://discontents.com.au/?p=2163

This has been a rather lean year on the blogging front. So as 2013 nears its end, I thought I should at least try to list a few recent talks and experiments.

Things changed a bit this year. No more am I the freelance troublemaker, coding in lonely seclusion, contemplating the mysteries of cashflow. Reader, I got a job.

And not just any old job. In May I started work at the National Library of Australia as the Manager of Trove.

Trove, of course, has featured prominently here. I’ve screen-scraped, harvested, graphed and analysed it — I even built an ‘unofficial’ API. Last year the NLA rewarded my tinkering with a Harold White Fellowship. This year they gave me the keys and let me sit behind the wheel. Now Trove is not only my obsession, it’s my responsibility.

Trove is a team effort, and soon you’ll be meeting more of the people that keep it running through our new blog. I manage the awesome Trove Support Team. We’re the frontline troops — working with users, content partners and developers, and generally keeping an eye on things.

And so my working hours are consumed by matters managerial — attending meetings, writing reports, planning plans and answering emails. But, when exhaustion allows, I return to the old WraggeLabs shed on weekends and evenings and the tinkering continues…

TroveNewsBot

TroveNewsBot is a Twitter bot whose birth is chronicled in TroveNewsBot: The story so far. Several times a day he posts a recently-updated newspaper article from Trove. But he also responds to your queries — just tweet some keywords at him and he’ll reply with the closest match. You can read the docs for hints on modifying your query.

TroveNewsBot also offers comment on web pages. Tweet him a url and he’ll analyse its content and search for something relevant amidst his database of more than 100 million newspaper articles. Every few hours he automatically checks the ABC News Just In page for the latest headlines and offers a historical counterpoint.

In Conversations between collections you can read the disturbing story of how TroveNewsBot began to converse with his fellow collection bots, DPLABot and now DigitalNZBot. The rise of the bots has begun…

I should say something more serious here about the importance of mobilising our collections — of taking them into the spaces where people already are. But I think that might have to wait for another day.

Build-a-bot workshop

You can never have too many bots. Trove includes the collections of many individual libraries, archives and museums — conveniently aggregated for your searching pleasure. So why shouldn’t each of these collections have its own bot?

It didn’t take much work to clean up TroveNewsBot’s code and package it up as the Build-a-bot workshop. There any Trove contributor can find instructions for creating their own code-creature, tweeting their resources to the world.

So far Kasparbot (National Museum of Australia) and CurtinLibBot (Curtin University Library) have joined the march of the bots. Hopefully more will follow!

TroveNewsBot Selects

Inspired by the British Library’s Mechanical Curator, TroveNewsBot decided to widen his field of operations to include Tumblr. There at TroveNewsBot Selects he posts a new random newspaper illustration every few hours.

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Serendip-o-matic

Unfortunately being newly-employed meant that I had to give up my place at One Week | One Tool. The team created Serendip-o-matic, a web tool for serendipitous searching that used the DPLA, Europeana and Flickr APIs. But while I missed all the fun, I could at least jump in with a little code. Within a day of its launch, Serendip-o-matic was also searching Trove.

Research Trends

This was a quick hack for my presentation at eResearch2013 — I basically just took the QueryPic code and rewired it to search across Australian theses in Trove. What I ended up with was a simple way of exploring research trends in Australia from the 1950s.

'history AND identity' vs 'history AND class'
‘history AND identity’ vs ‘history AND class’

Some of the thesis metadata is a bit dodgy (we’re looking into it!) so I wouldn’t want to draw any serious conclusions, but I think it does suggest some interesting possibilities.

Trove API Console

As a Trove API user I’ve always been a bit frustrated about the inability to share live examples because of the need for a unique, private key. Europeana has a great API Console that lets you explore the output of API requests, so I thought I’d create something similar.

My Trove API Console is very simple at the moment. You just feed it API requests (no key required) and it will display nicely-formatted responses. You can also pass the API request as query parameter to the console, which means you can create easily shareable examples. Here’s a request for wragge AND weather in the newspapers zone.

This is also my first app hosted on Heroku. Building and deploying with Flask and Heroku was intoxicatingly easy.

Trove Zone Explorer

Yep, I finally got around to playing with d3. Nothing fancy, but once I’d figured out how to transform the faceted format data from Trove into the structure used by many of the d3 examples I could easily create a basic treemap and sunburst.

Screen Shot 2013-12-23 at 11.12.04 pm

The sunburst visualisation was pretty nice and I thought it might make a useful tool for exploring the contents of Trove’s various zones. After a bit more fiddling I created a zoomable version that automatically loads a random sample of resources whenever you click on one of the outer leaves — the Trove Zone Explorer was born.

Trove Collection Profiler

As mentioned above, Trove is made up of collections from many different contributors. For my talk at the Libraries Australia Forum I thought I’d make a tool that let you explore these collections as they appear within Trove.

The Trove Collection Profiler does that, and a bit more. Using filters you define a collection by specifying contributors, keywords, or a date range. You can then explore how that collection is distributed across the Trove zones — viewing the results over time as a graph, or drilling down through format types using another zoomable sunburst visualisation. As a bonus you get shareable urls to pass around your profiles.

The latest sunburst-enabled version is fresh out of the shed and badly in need of documentation. I’m thinking of creating embeddable versions, so that institutions can’t create visualisations of their own collections and include them in their sites.

Presentations

Somewhere in amongst the managering and the tinkering I gave a few presentations:

]]> http://discontents.com.au/8-months-on/feed/ 2 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 2163 Conversations with collections http://discontents.com.au/conversations-with-collections/ http://discontents.com.au/conversations-with-collections/#comments Mon, 24 Jun 2013 11:46:31 +0000 http://discontents.com.au/?p=2114

Notes from a talk I gave at the Digital Treasures Symposium, 21 June 2013, University of Canberra.

Over the last couple of weekends I’ve been building a bot. Let me introduce you to the TroveNewsBot.

Screen Shot 2013-06-20 at 7.40.35 PM

TroveNewsBot is just a simple script that periodically checks for messages from Twitter, uses those messages to create queries in Trove’s newspaper database, and tweets back the results.

TroveNewsBot’s birth was, however, not without some pain. I ran into difficulty with Twitter’s automated spam police. At one stage everytime my bot tweeted, its Twitter account was suspended.

Twitter’s bots didn’t like my bot. [:(]

The problem has since been resolved — I think I must have done something when I was testing that upset the spam bots — but it did lead me to read in detail Twitter’s policies on spam and automation. This sentence in particular caused me to reflect:

The @reply and Mention functions are intended to make communication between users easier, and automating these processes in order to reach many users is considered an abuse of the feature.

So what is a user and what is communication? I read this sentence as suggesting that communications between individual human users were somehow more real, more authentic than automatically generated replies. But is a script tweeting someone a link to to a newspaper article that they might be interested in really less authentic than a lot of the human-generated traffic on the net?

Amongst the messages I received when I revealed TroveNewsBot to the world earlier this week was this:

And later from the same person:

 

Even as we live an increasing amount of our lives ‘connected’, still there remains a tendency to assume that experiences mediated through online technologies are somehow less authentic than those that take place in this space that we often refer to as ‘the real world’.

In the realm of cultural heritage, digitisation is frequently assumed to be a process of loss. We create surrogates, or derivatives — useful, but somehow inferior representations of ‘the real thing’.

Now let’s just all admit that, yes, we like the smell of old books, and that we can’t read in the bath with our iPad, and move beyond the sort of fetishism that often accompanies these sorts of discussions.

Yes, of course, digital and physical manifestations are different, the point is whether we get anywhere by arguing that one is necessarily inferior to the other.

A recent article in the Times Literary Supplement expressed concern at the money being spent on the manuscript digitisation programs that the author argued were ‘proceeding unchecked and unfocused, deflecting students into a virtual world and leaving them unequipped to deal responsibly with real rare materials’. Yes, there may be aspects of a physical page that a digital copy cannot represent, but as Alistair Dunning pointed out in response to the article, there’s no simple binary opposition:

The digital does not replace the analogue, but augments it, sometimes in dramatic and sometimes in subtle ways.

In his keynote address to the ‘Digital Transformers’ conference, Jim Mussell similarly argued against a simplistic understanding of digital deficiencies.

The key is to reconceive loss as difference and use the way the transformed object differs to reimagine what it actually was. Critical encounters with digitized objects make us rethink what we thought we knew.

I’m very pleased to be an adjunct here at the University of Canberra, but I’ve always felt a bit of a fraud around people like Mitchell when it comes to talking about visualisation. I’m actually much more comfortable with words than pictures. So why am I here talking to you today?

I think it’s because what we’re discussing today, what the Digital Treasures Program is about, is not just visualisation. It’s about transformation. It’s about taking cultural heritage collections and changing them. Changing what we can do with them. Changing how we see them. Changing how we think about them.

It’s about creating spaces within which we can have ‘critical encounters with digitized objects’ that ‘make us rethink what we thought we knew’.

And that to me is very exciting.

What might these transformations look like? Who knows? This is research, it should take us places we don’t expect and can’t predict.

However, for the sake of convenience today I’ve tried to define a few possible categories — most, admittedly, based on my own work. But I do so in the hope that the achievements of the Digital Treasures program will soon make my categories look ridiculously inadequate.

Analysis

When we have stuff in digital form — and by stuff I mean both collection metadata and digital objects — we can isolate particular characteristics and add them up, compare them, graph them. We can start to see patterns that we couldn’t see before.

Assembly

Putting a lot of similar things together in a way that enables us to see them differently.

Juxtaposition

Putting different things together in a way that enables us to find connections or similarities.

Serendipity

Displaying something unexpected or random.

Mobilisation

Putting things in new contexts, new conceptual spaces, new physical spaces, new geospatial spaces. Creating interventions and explorations.

This is a very limited catalogue of possibilities, but meagre as it is I think its enough to demonstrate that the overwhelming feature of digital cultural collections is not loss or deficiency, but opportunity and inspiration.

In fact I’m less worried about the deficiencies of digital representation than I am about the possibility that we might end up doing too much — that we might become so skilled in design and transformation that we end up overdetermining the experience of our users, that we end up doing too much of the thinking for them.

It seems to me that when it comes to digital cultural collections an important part of the transformation process is knowing where to leave the gaps and spaces that invite feeling, reflection and critique. We have to find ways of representing what is missing, of acknowledging absence and exclusion. We have to be able to expose our arguments and assumptions, to be honest about our failures and limitations. We have to be prepared to leave a few raw edges, some loose threads that encourage users to unravel our carefully-woven tapestries.

As I was developing the TroveNewsBot I realised I needed some sort of avatar. So of course I started searching in the Trove newspaper database for robots — there I found Mr George Robot.

The Courier-Mail, 7 November 1935, page 21
The Courier-Mail, 7 November 1935, page 21

George Robot, ‘described as the greatest electro-mechanical achievement of the age’ toured Australia in 1935 and 1936. As one newspaper described, he:

rises and sits as requested, talks, sings, delivers an address on the most abstruse topics, gnashes his electric teeth in rage or derision, while he accentuates his remarks by the most natural movements of arms and hands

But it wasn’t just George’s technical sophistication that inspired comment. Articles also appeared that described George’s love for Mae West and his admiration for Hitler.

Robots provide us with an opportunity not just to marvel at their technological wizardry, but also to think about what it really is to be human.

In the same way, as we start to have new types of conversations with online collections, to explore their many-faceted personalities, we will of course be exploring ourselves.

The digital transformation of cultural collections is not about showcasing technology but about creating new online spaces in which we can simply be human.

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