My stint as Creative Technologist-in-Residence at the State Library of Victoria LAB comes to an end in a few weeks time and I’m frantically trying to pull things together. I’ll be back on-site at the Library from 1 to 5 December for a few events, and to report back to staff on what I’ve been doing. On Tuesday 2 December, there’ll be a public workshop on using and contributing to the GLAM Workbench.
I posted recently about my new fully-searchable version of the Sands & MacDougall directories. I’ve now moved on to try and pull together a number of the State Library of Victoria’s place-based collections into a new discovery interface. It’s going to be a busy couple of weeks as my residency ends in early December! I wanted to incorporate Sands & Mac search results into the new interface. Getting the data was easy because Datasette has a JSON API baked in.
In the fortnight I spent onsite at the State Library of Victoria, ‘Sands & Mac’ was mentioned many times. And no wonder. The Sands & McDougall’s directories are a goldmine for anyone researching family, local, or social history. They list thousands of names and addresses, enabling you to find individuals, and explore changing land use over time. When people ask the SLV’s librarians, ‘What can you tell me about the history of my house?
I often describe what I do as GLAM data plumbing. Most of the time I’m not creating new tools, I’m figuring out what data is available and how I can connect it up to existing tools. It’s rarely straightforward, but if I can get all the pipes connected and data flowing in the right direction, suddenly new things become possible. Things like turning all the State Library of Victoria’s digitised maps into data.
Originally published in Pharos, newsletter of the Professional Historian’s Association (Vic & Tas), October-November 2025, in the ‘Member Profile’ section. What was your first history related job? What path have you taken since then? In the early 1990s I started working for a small self-funded organisation called the Australian Science Archives Project. Our mission was to preserve and raise awareness of Australia’s scientific past. When the web came along, we realised it provided an enormous opportunity to communicate history to the public.
The State Library of Victoria holds a collection of 8,804 parish maps. As part of my residency at the SLV LAB, I’ve been poking around in the metadata. SLV staff have geocoded many of the parish maps using the Composite Gazetteer of Australia, which provides coordinates for Victorian parishes and boroughs. These coordinates give us a point which should be roughly at the centre of each map, enabling us to visualise their locations and distribution.
I like urls. They take you places. And if you know how to read them, they can tell you things about the systems that created them. One of the first things I did when I started my residency at SLV LAB, was to try and understand how their collection urls work. There’s a couple of well-worn methods I use when digging into a new site. The first is url hacking – this involves fiddling around with the parameters in a url and submitting the result to see what happens.
I’m very excited to be the new Creative Technologist-in-Residence at the SLV LAB. For the next few months I get to play around with metadata and images, think about online access, experiment with different technologies, and build things to help people to explore the State Library’s collections. In other words, I get to be in my happy place! My group at the recent SLV WikiFest was thinking about ways of helping researchers find resources relating to particular locations – how do I find material about my suburb, or my street?
This week I was lucky enough to participate in WikiFest at the State Library of Victoria. Organised by the State Library’s new innovation LAB and Wikimedia Australia, Wikifest was a hands-on, participant-led workshop focused on the possibilities of connecting SLV’s collections to (and through!) Wikidata. The day kicked off with a series of presentations demonstrating possible uses of Wikidata. I talked a bit about some of my recent GLAM/Wikidata experiments. My slides are online and contain plenty of links to code, demonstrations, and documentation.
In teaching and workshops I used to get students to question the idea that websites are ‘published’. They’re not released into the world in a fixed, immutable form – they’re a set of blueprints which only reach their final form in your browser window. This makes it possible to change the way websites look and behave. Mozilla used to have a nifty educational tool called X-Ray Googles. Using it you could explore the code underlying a web page and do fun things like inserting new text or images.
It looks like some paid work I was counting on won’t be going ahead, so I’m trying to save a bit of money on cloud hosting. As I previously noted, this resulted in the resurrection of The future of the past, but I’ve also been continuing to slog away at migrating all my old Flask apps and experiments from Heroku to a single Digital Ocean droplet. As of today, I’ve migrated 11 apps.
I’ve been on a bit of a self-archiving binge lately. It started because I needed to cut back some of my web hosting costs, and was looking at ways of bringing together a group of separately hosted Heroku apps onto a single Digital Ocean droplet. While taking stock of my various apps and experiments, I remembered there were some that hadn’t survived earlier migrations – in particular, the future of the past.
In 2012, I was lucky enough to be awarded a Harold White Fellowship by the National Library of Australia. I used my time to explore ways of using Trove’s digitised newspapers as data, and presented my work at a public lecture in May 2012. I spoke from notes and never got round to writing it all up. The recording made by the NLA has disappeared from their website, but is still available in the Internet Archive.
The socials recently alerted me to an interesting article by Dominique Carlon, Jean Burgess, and Kateryna Kasianenko on the history of community-created Twitter bots. The article explores bot-making within the context of Twitter’s rise and fall, and provides a handy taxonomy of bot species. However, it doesn’t include any Australian bots amidst the examples. That’s a bit disappointing, as I remember the bot-building years as a time of great fun and creativity.
It’s International Archives Week and I’m feeling a bit crook after being double-vaxxed yesterday, so instead of doing something productive, I’m just going to make a list of potentially handy archives-related resources from the Wonderful World of Wragge(TM). The theme of Archives Week is #ArchivesAreAccessible, which you’d have to regard as rather aspirational given the various ways access is limited by law, policy, practice, technology, and history. But what the heck, discussions about the meaning of access are always welcome.
A few years ago, I harvested the details of tweets that included links to Trove. The data has just been sitting on my computer, so I thought I should package it up and share, in case it’s of use to anyone. The story is that back in 2021, I was working on the article ‘More than newspapers’ for a special section of History Australia focusing on Trove. I was thinking that I might include something about the way Trove newspaper articles were mobilised within online discussions about history – a topic I first explored in ‘Life on the outside: connections, contexts, and the wild, wild web’, my keynote for the Annual Conference of the Japanese Association of Digital Humanities in 2014.
This is a preprint of my contribution to the publication ‘Building User-Friendly Toolkits and Platforms for Digital Humanities’. It provides a brief overview of the GLAM Workbench. I had to leave a lot out, but hopefully it provides a useful summary of what the GLAM Workbench is, and what I’d like it to be. The GLAM Workbench is a collection of tools and resources created to help researchers use and explore the digital collections of GLAM organisations (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums).
A couple of weeks ago I bid farewell to Trove due to the cancellation of my API keys and the NLA’s lack of transparency around changes to API access. Now it seems I have to wave goodbye to 16+ years of work on RecordSearch, the National Archives of Australia’s online database. I noticed this morning that my weekly harvest of recently digitised files in RecordSearch had failed. A quick check showed that my harvester was being blocked by Cloudflare’s bot protection software.
Over the last few months I’ve been grappling with the cancellation of my Trove API keys by the National Library of Australia. It may seem like a minor technical hiccup from the outside, but it’s had a major personal impact. For the sake of my health, I’ve decided to stop work on Trove, archive all my code repositories related to Trove, and move on. Farewell Trove. But don’t panic! All of my Trove tools and resources available through the GLAM Workbench and elsewhere will remain online.
Last week the State Library of Victoria launched SLV LAB, a prototyping and innovation lab that ‘experiment[s] with technology to open access to collections, data and spaces’. The SLV LAB encourages collaboration, and is sharing code, datasets, and tutorials. It’s an exciting development and I’m looking forward to seeing what they get up to. I’ve added SLV LAB to the GLAM data portals & repositories section of my Australian GLAM data list.