I’ve always been interested in the way people add value to resources in Trove. OCR correction tends to get all the attention, but Trove users have also been busy organising resources using tags, lists, and comments. I used to refer to tagging quite often in presentations, pointing to the different ways they were used. For example, ‘TBD’ is a workflow marker, used by text correctors to label articles that are ‘To Be Done’. My favourite was ‘LRRSA’, one of the most heavily-used tags across the whole of Trove. What does it mean? It stands for the Light Rail Research Society of Australia, and the tag is used by members to mark items of shared interest. It’s a great example of how something as simple as plain text tags can be used to support collaboration and build communities.

Until its update last year, Trove used to provide some basic stats about user activity. There was also a tag cloud that let you explore the most commonly-used tags. It’s now much harder to access this sort of information. However, you can extract some basic information about tags from the Trove API. First of all, you can filter a search using ‘has:tags’ to limit the results to items that have tags attached to them. Then to find out what the tags actually are, you can add the include=tags parameter. This embeds the tags within the item record, so you can work through a set of results, extracting all the tags as you go. To save you the trouble, I’ve done this for the whole of Trove, and ended up with a dataset containing more than 8 million tags!

The dataset is saved as a 500mb CSV file, and contains the following fields:

• tag – lower-cased version of the tag
• date – date the tag was added
• zone – the API zone that contains the tagged resource
• resource_id – the identifier of he tagged resource

There’s a few things to note about the data:

• Works (such as books) in Trove can have tags attached at either work or version level. This dataset aggregates all tags at the work level, removing any duplicates.
• A single resource in Trove can appear in multiple zones – for example, a book that includes maps and illustrations might appear in the ‘book’, ‘picture’, and ‘map’ zones. This means that some of the tags will essentially be duplicates – harvested from different zones, but relating to the same resource. Depending on your interests, you might want to remove these duplicates.
• While most of the tags were added by Trove users, more than 500,000 tags were added by Trove itself in November 2009. I think these tags were automatically generated from related Wikipedia pages. Depending on your interests, you might want to exclude these by limiting the date range or zones.
• User content added to Trove, including tags, is available for reuse under a CC-BY-NC licence.

You can download the complete dataset from Zenodo, or from CloudStor. For more information on how I harvested the data, and some of its limits and complexities, see the notebooks in the new ‘Tags’ section in the GLAM Workbench. There’s also some examples of analysing and visualising the tags. As an extra bonus, there’s a more compact 50mb CSV dataset which lists each unique tag and the number of times it has been used.

Of course, it’s worth remembering that this sort of dataset is out of date before the harvest is even finished. More tags are being added all the time! But hopefully this data will help us better understand the way people work to organise and enrich complex resources like Trove. #dhhacks

I’ve spent a lot of time this year working on ways of improving the GLAM Workbench’s documentation and its integration with other services. Last year I created OzGLAM Help to provide a space where users of GLAM collections could ask questions and share discoveries – including a dedicated GLAM Workbench channel. Earlier this year, I tweaked my Micro.blog powered updates to include a dedicated GLAM Workbench news feed. Now I’ve brought the two together! What does this mean?

• Any GLAM Workbench news that I post to my updates feed is now automatically added to OzGLAM Help
• Links are automatically added to items in the news feed that let you add comments or questions in OzGLAM Help

So now there’s two-way communication between the services providing more ways for people to discover and discuss how the GLAM Workbench can help them.

I’ve started creating short videos to introduce or explain various components of the GLAM Workbench. The first video shows how you can visualise searches in Trove’s digitised newspapers using the latest version of QueryPic. It’s a useful introduction to the way access to collection data enables us to ask different types of questions of historical sources.

As with all GLAM Workbench resources, the video is openly-licensed – so feel free to stop it into your own course materials or workshops. It could, for example, provide an interesting little digital methods task in an Australian history unit.

I’ll be creating a second QueryPic video shortly, demonstrating how you can work with complex queries and differing timescales. Let me know if you find it useful, or if you have any ideas for future topics. #dhhacks

To help you make use of the GLAM Workbench, I’ve set up an ‘office hours’ time slot every Friday when people can book in for 30 minute chats via Zoom. Want to talk about how you might use the GLAM Workbench in your latest research project? Are you having trouble getting started with GLAM data? Or perhaps you have some ideas for future notebooks you’d like to share? Just click on the ‘Book a chat’ link in the GLAM Workbench, or head straight to the scheduling page to set up a time!

This is yet another experiment to see how I can support the use of GLAM data and the development of digital skills with the GLAM Workbench. Let me know if you think it’s worthwhile. #dhhacks

An article written by Kate Bagnall and me has just been published in a special issue of the Journal of World History focusing on digital history. And it’s open access!

The article is ‘Missing Links: Data Stories from the Archive of British Settler Colonial Citizenship’. In it we document our efforts to assemble a number of different datasets relating to naturalization. Here’s the abstract:

Digitized sources and digital methods are changing the way that we do history. For historians of the British Empire, the digital age offers new possibilities for investigating the lives of those who moved around the empire and across the world. However, much discussion of the possibilities and problems of digital history have focused on the creation and use of full text resources, skipping over the analytical opportunities offered by the descriptive systems in which those texts are embedded. This article is an attempt to fill this gap by documenting a journey through archival data relating to nineteenth-century Chinese naturalization in the Pacific Rim settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. We argue that such data stories are critical if we are to understand both possibilities and pitfalls of research in digital collections.

There’s also an GitHub repository with code and data related to the article.

QueryPic is a tool to visualise searches in Trove’s digitised newspapers. I created the first version way back in 2011, and since then it’s taken a number of different forms. The latest version introduces some new features:

• Automatic query creation – construct your search in the Trove web interface, then just copy and paste the url into QueryPic. This means you can take advantage of Trove’s advanced search and facets to build complex queries.
• Multiple time scales – previous versions only aggregated search results by year, but now you can also aggregate by month, or by day. QueryPic will automatically choose a time unit based on the date range of your query, but if you’re not happy with the result you can change it!
• Links back to Trove – click on any of the points on the chart to search Trove within that time period. This enables you to zoom in and out of your results, from the high-level visualisation, to individual articles.

This version of QueryPic is built within a Jupyter notebook, and designed to run using Voila (which hides all the code and makes the notebook look like a web app). See the Trove Newspapers section of the GLAM Workbench for more information. If you’d like to give it a try, just click the button below to run it live using Binder.

Hope you find it useful! #dhhacks

I recently took part in a panel at the IIPC Web Archiving Conference discussing ‘Research use of web archives: a Labs approach’. My fellow panellists described some amazing stuff going on in European cultural heritage organisations to support researchers who want to make use of web archives. My ‘lab’ doesn’t have a physical presence, or an institutional home, but it does provide a starting point for researchers, and with the latest Reclaim Cloud and Docker integrations, everyone can have their own web archives lab! Here’s my 8 minute video. The slides are available here.

When the 1-click installer for Reclaim Cloud works its magic and turns GLAM Workbench repositories into your own, personal digital labs, it creates a new work directory mounted inside of your main Jupyter directory. This new directory is independent of the Docker image used to run Jupyter, so it’s a handy place to copy things if you ever want to update the Docker image. However, I just realised that there was a permissions problem with the work directory which meant you couldn’t write files to it from within Jupyter.

To fix the problem, I’ve added an extra line to the reclaim-manifest.jps config file to make the Jupyter user the owner of the work directory:

	- cmd[cp]: chown -R jovyan:jovyan /home/jovyan/work

This takes care of any new installations. If you have an existing installation, you can either just create a completely new environment using the updated config, or you can manually change the permissions:

• Hover over the name of your environment in the control panel to display the option buttons.
• Click on the Settings button. A new box will open at the bottom of the control panel with all the settings options.
• Click on ‘SSH Access’ in the left hand menu of the settings box.
• Click on the ‘SSH Connection’ tab.
• Under ‘Web SSH’ click on the Connect button and select the default node.

• A terminal session will open. At the command line enter the following:

  	chown -R jovyan:jovyan /home/jovyan/work
  

Done! See the Using Reclaim Cloud section of the GLAM Workbench for more information.

I’ve been working on an essay for publication in a forthcoming edited collection. I wanted to explore how the practice of history in Australia had been changed by GLAM organisations making their collections available online – both the new possibilities that had emerged, and the problems that remained. In the end I focused on three areas – discovery, digitisation, and research infrastructure. If you’re interested, I’ve shared a preprint on Zenodo.

Here’s a taste:

Just twenty years ago, historical research often entailed long hours spent at a microfilm reader, browsing newspaper after newspaper in the hope of finding something relevant. The changes wrought by Trove, and other digital collections, seem revolutionary, but as with all revolutions there have been gains and losses. Alongside the wonders wrought by digitisation, this chapter has tried to highlight some of the paths not taken. The online resources we now use daily are not simply the products of technology – priorities have been set, funding has been distributed, decisions made about what to include and what to leave out. Cultural heritage collections are not just put online, they are placed within specific contexts of discovery and use. Each object, each version, each interface comes with a set of limitations and affordances that together determine what is possible. We do not know yet how these decisions will shape the sorts of histories that we write.

I enjoyed reminding myself about some early digital initiatives in the GLAM sector, but as is usual with these sorts of projects, I had to leave a lot out. It’s made me think about developing a larger project documenting our gains and losses.

Here’s a new little Python package that you might find useful. It simply takes a search url from Trove’s Newspapers & Gazettes category and converts it into a set of parameters that you can use to request data from the Trove API. While some parameters are used both in the web interface and the API, there are a lot of variations – this package means you don’t have to keep track of all the differences!

It’s very simple to use.

The code for the parser has been basically lifted from the Trove Newspaper Harvester. I wanted to separate it out so that I could use it at various spots in the GLAM Workbench and in other projects.

This package, the documentation, and the tests were all created using nbdev, which is really quite a fun way to develop Python packages. #dhhacks

I deliberately don’t keep any stats about GLAM Workbench visits, because I think they’re pretty meaningless. On the other hand, I’m always interested to see how often GLAM Workbench repositories are launched on Binder. Rather than just random clicks, these numbers represent the number of times users started new computing sessions using the GLAM Workbench. I just compiled these stats for the past year, and I was very pleased to see that the Web Archives section has been launched over 1,000 times in the past twelve months! The Trove Newspapers and Trove Newspaper Harvester repositories are also well used – on average these are both being launched more than once a day.

The GLAM Workbench is never going to attract massive numbers of users – it’s all about being there when a researcher needs help to use GLAM collections. One or two launches per day means one or two researchers from somewhere around the world are able to explore new datasets, or ask new questions. I think that’s pretty important.

Five of the GLAM Workbench repositories now have automatically built Docker images and 1-click integration with Reclaim Cloud – ANU Archives, Trove Newspapers, Trove Newspaper Harvester, NAA RecordSearch, & Web Archives.

This means you can launch your very own version of these GLAM Workbench repositories in the cloud, where all your downloads and experiments will be saved! Find out more on the Using Reclaim Cloud page.

I’ve updated my harvest of Australian GLAM datasets from state/national government open data portals. There’s now 387 datasets, containing 1049 files (including 684 CSVs). There’s a list if you want to browse, and a CSV file if you want to download all the metadata. For more more information see the data portals section of the GLAM Workbench.

If you’re interested in finding out what’s inside all those 684 CVS files, take the GLAM CSV Explorer for a spin! It’s also been given a refresh, with new data and a new interface. #dhhacks

If you work with the collections of the National Archives of Australia, you might find the RecordSearch section of the GLAM Workbench helpful. I’ve just updated the repository to add new options for running the notebooks, including 1-click installation on Reclaim Cloud. There’s also a few new notebooks.

New notebooks and datasets

• Harvest details of all series in RecordSearch – get details of all series registered in RecordSearch, also generates a summary dataset with the total number of items digitised, described and in each access category
• Exploring harvested series data – generates some basic statistics from the harvest of series data
• Summary data about all series in RecordSearch (15mb CSV) – contains basic descriptive information about all the series currently registered on RecordSearch (May 2021) as well as the total number of items described, digitised, and in each access category

Updated

I’ve started (but not completed) updating all the notebooks in this repository to use my new RecordSearch Data Scraper. The new scraper is simpler and more efficient, and enables me to get rid of a lot of boilerplate code. Updated notebooks include:

• Harvest items from a search in RecordSearch – save the results of an item search in RecordSearch as a downloadable dataset, you can also save images and PDFs from digitised files (PDF saving is new!)
• Harvest files with the access status of ‘closed’ – find out what we’re not allowed to see by harvesting details of ‘closed’ files

Other updates include:

• Python packages updated
• Integration with Reclaim Cloud allowing 1-click installation of the whole repository and environment
• Automatic creation of Docker images when the repository is updated
• Updated README and repository index with list of all notebooks
• Notebooks intended to run as apps now use Voila rather than Appmode for better integration with Jupyter Lab
• requirements-unpinned.txt added to repository for people who want to develop the notebooks in their own clean environment

Hope you find these changes useful! #dhhacks

My program of rolling out new features and integrations across the GLAM Workbench continues. The latest section to be updated is the Web Archives section!

There are no new notebooks with this update, but some important changes under the hood. If you haven’t used it before, the Web Archives section contains 16 notebooks providing documentation, tools, apps, and examples to help you make use of web archives in your research. The notebooks are grouped by the following topics: Types of data, Harvesting data and creating datasets, and Exploring change over time.

I’ve updated all the Python packages used in this repository and changed the app-ified notebooks to run using Voila (which is better integrated with Jupyter Lab than Appmode). But most importantly, you can now install the repository into your own persistent environment using Reclaim Cloud or Docker.

As Christie Moffatt noted recently harvesting data from web archives can take a long time, and you might hit the limits of the free Binder service. These new integrations mean you don’t have to worry about your notebooks timing out. Just click on the Launch on Reclaim Cloud button and you can have your own fully-provisioned, persistent environment up and running in minutes!

This is possible because every change to the Web Archives repository now triggers the build of a new Docker image with all the software that you need pre-installed. You can also run this Docker image on your own computer, or using another cloud service.

The Web Archives section now includes documentation on running the notebooks using Binder, Reclaim, Cloud or Docker. #dhhacks

There’s no doubt that Trove’s digitised newspapers have had a significant impact on the practice of history in Australia. But analysing that impact is difficult when Trove itself is always changing – more newspapers and articles are being added all the time.

In an attempt to chart the development of Trove, I’ve created a dataset that shows (approximately) when particular newspaper titles were first added. This gives a rough snapshot of what Trove contained at any point in the last 12 years.

I say approximately because the only public source of this information are web archives like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and Trove itself. By downloading captures of Trove’s browse page, I was able to extract a list of newspaper titles available when that capture was made. Depending on the frequency of captures, the titles may have been first made available some time earlier.

The method I used to create the dataset is documented in the Trove Newspapers section of the GLAM Workbench. I used the Internet Archive as my source rather than Trove just because there were more captures available. Most of the code I could conveniently copy from the Web Archives section of the GLAM Workbench, in particular the Find all the archived versions of a particular web page notebook.

The result was actually two datasets:

• trove_newspaper_titles_2009_2021.csv – complete dataset of captures and titles
• trove_newspaper_titles_first_appearance_2009_2021.csv – filtered dataset, showing only the first appearance of each title / place / date range combination

There’s also an alphabetical list of newspaper titles for easy browsing. The list shows the date of the capture in which the title was first recorded, as well as any changes to its date range. #dhhacks

To make it easier for people to suggest additions, I’ve created a GitHub repository for my list of GLAM Jupyter examples and resources. Contributions are welcome!

This list is automatically pulled into the GLAM Workbench’s help documentation. #dhhacks

I recently made some changes in the GLAM Workbench’s Help documentation, adding a new Running notebooks section. This section provides detailed information of running and managing GLAM Workbench repositories using Reclaim Cloud and Docker.

I’m still rolling out this functionality across all the repositories, but it’s going to take a while. When I’m finished you’ll be able to create your own persistent environment on Reclaim Cloud from any repository with just the click of a button. See the Trove Newspapers section to try this out now! #dhhacks

As I foreshadowed some weeks ago, I’ve shut down my Patreon page. Thanks to everyone who has supported me there over the last few years!

I’ve now shifted across to GitHub Sponsors, which is focused on supporting open source projects. This seems like a much better fit for the things that I do, which are all free and open by default.

So if you think things like the GLAM Workbench, Historic Hansard, OzGLAM Help, and The Real Face of White Australia are worth supporting, you can sign up using my GitHub Sponsors page. Sponsorship tiers start at just $1 a month. Financially, your contributions help pay some of my cloud hosting bills and keep everything online. But just as important is the encouragement and motivation I get from knowing that there are people out there who think this work is important and useful.

To recognise my GitHub sponsors, I’ve also created a new Supporters page in the GLAM Workbench.

Thanks!

I’ve updated, refreshed, and reorganised the Trove newspapers section of the GLAM Workbench. There’s currently 22 Jupyter notebooks organised under the following headings:

• Trove newspapers in context – Notebooks in this section look at the Trove newspaper corpus as a whole, to try and understand what’s there, and what’s not.
• Visualising searches – Notebooks in this section demonstrate some ways of visualising searches in Trove newspapers – seeing everything rather than just a list of search results.
• Useful tools – Notebooks in this section provide useful tools that extend or enhance the Trove web interface and API.
• Tips and tricks – Notebooks in this section provide some useful hints to use with the Trove API.
• Get creative – Notebooks in this section look at ways you can use data from Trove newspapers in creative ways.

There’s also a number of pre-harvested datasets.

Recently refreshed analyses, visualisations, and datasets include:

• Number of Trove newspaper articles by year and state (notebook)
• Analysing OCR correction in Trove’s newspapers (notebook)
• List of Trove newspapers in languages other than English (markdown formatted list)
• Newspapers with content from beyond the 1954 copyright ‘cliff of death’ (CSV file)

As part of the update, notebooks that are intended to run as apps (with all the code hidden) have been updated to use Voila. But perhaps the thing I’m most excited about are the new options for running the notebooks. As well as being able to launch the notebooks on Binder, you can now create your very own, persistent environment on Reclaim Cloud with just a click of a button.

There’s also an automatically-built Docker image of this repository, containing everything you need to run the notebooks on your own computer. Check out the new Run these notebooks section for details. I’m gradually rolling this out across all the repositories in the GLAM Workbench. #dhhacks

It was way back in 2009 that I created my first scraper for getting machine-readable data out of the National Archives of Australia’s online database, RecordSearch. Since then I’ve used versions of this scraper in a number of different projects such as The Real Face of White Australia, Closed Access, and Redacted (including the recent update). The scraper is also embedded in many of the notebooks that I’ve created for the RecordSearch section of the GLAM Workbench.

However, the scraper was showing its age. The main problem was that one of its dependencies, Robobrowser, is no longer maintained. This made it difficult to update. I’d put off a major rewrite, thinking that RecordSearch itself might be getting a much-needed overhaul, but I could wait no longer. Introducing the brand new RecordSearch Data Scraper.

Just like the old version, the new scraper delivers machine-readable data relating to Items, Series and Agencies – both from individual records, and search results. It also adds a little extra to the basic metadata, for example, if an Item is digitised, the data includes the number of pages in the file. Series records can include the number of digitised files, and the breakdown of files by access category.

The new scraper adds in some additional search parameters for Series and Agencies. It also makes use of a simple caching system to improve speed and efficiency. RecordSearch makes use of an odd assortment of sessions, redirects, and hidden forms, which make scraping a challenge. Hopefully I’ve nailed down the idiosyncrasies, but I expect to catching bugs for a while.

I created the new scraper in Jupyter using NBDev. NBDev helps you to keep your code, examples, tests, and documentation all together in Jupyter notebooks. When you’re ready, it converts the code from the notebooks into distributable Python libraries, runs all your tests, and builds a documentation site. It’s very cool.

Having updated the scraper, I now need to update the notebooks in the GLAM Workbench – more on that soon. The maintenance never ends! #dhhacks

Here’s the video of my presentation, ‘Secrets and lies’, for the (Re)create symposium at the University of Canberra, 21 April 2021. It’s mainly about finding and resting redactions in ASIO surveillance files held by the National Archives of Australia.

Secrets and lives from Tim Sherratt on Vimeo.

Here are links to the various sites and resources mentioned in the video:

• For more on records relating to the White Australia policy see The Real Face of White Australia
• Some summary information on ASIO records in the National Archives of Australia
• Jenny Holzer’s Mass MoCA exhibition, including redaction paintings
• CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years, The Onion, 2005
• Fun with the Petrovs, a Trove list that brings together photos from ASIO files in the NAA
• FOIA Facelift, MuckRock, 2020
• Redaction Hall of Shame, MuckRock, 2016
• Withheld Pending Advice, Inside Story, 2017, looks at ‘closed’ files in the NAA; the 2020 update is in this Twitter thread
• redacted, 2017 – browse my original collection of redactions
• The original #redactionart story, 2016-2017 – part 1 and part 2
• The Redaction Zoo, 2017
• DIY #redactionart , 2017 – repository of images
• Edward Shaddow’s #redactionart cookie cutters
• Wearing access, 2018, talk by Bonnie Wildie describing the creation of her #redactionart dress
• #redactionart jigsaw
• Some new #redactionart critters, 2021
• #redactionart hardcover journal, 2021, Redbubble
• #redactionart quilt cover, 2021, Redbubble
• #redactionart scarf, 2021, Redbubble
• DIY #redactionart collage – make your own collages of recycled ASIO redactions (includes at least one redaction art critter)

I haven’t yet written up the details of training my latest redaction finder. When I do, I’ll post it here! #dhhacks

I’m interested in understanding what gets digitised and when by our cultural institutions, but accessible data is scarce. The National Archives of Australia lists ‘newly scanned’ records in RecordSearch, so I thought I’d see if I could convert that list into a machine-readable form for analysis. I’ve had a lot of experience trying to get data out of RecordSearch, but even so it took me a while to figure out how the ‘newly scanned’ page worked. Eventually I was able to extract all the file metadata from the list and save it to a CSV file. The details are in this notebook in the GLAM Workbench.

I used the code to create a dataset of all the files digitised in the past month. The ‘newly scanned’ list only displays a month’s worth of additions, so that’s as much as I could get in one hit. In the past month, 24,039 files were digitised. 22,500 of these (about 93%) come from just four series of military records. This is no surprise, as the NAA is currently undertaking a major project to digitise WW2 service records. What is perhaps more interesting is the long tail of series from which a small number of files were digitised. 357 of the 375 series represented in the dataset (about 95%) appear 20 or fewer times. 210 series have had only one file digitised in the last month. I’m assuming that this diversity represents research interests, refracted through the digitisation on demand service. But this really needs more data, and more analysis.

As I mentioned, only one month’s data is available from RecordSearch at any time. To try and capture a longer record of the digitisation process, I’ve set up an automated ‘git scraper’ that runs every Sunday and captures metadata of all the files digitised in the preceding week. The weekly datasets are saved as CSV files in a public GitHub repository. Over time, this should become a useful dataset for exploring long-term patterns in digitisation. #dhhacks

Over the last few years, I’ve been very grateful for the support of my Patreon subscribers. Financially, their contributions have helped me cover a substantial proportion of the cloud hosting costs associated with projects like Historic Hansard and The Real Face of White Australia. But, more importantly, just knowing that they thought my work was of value has helped keep me going, and inspired me to develop a range of new resources.

However, while I’ve been grateful for the platform provided by Patreon, I’ve increasingly felt that it’s not a good fit for the sort of work I do. Patreon is geared towards providing special content to supporters, but, as you know, all my work is open. And that’s really important to me.

Recently GitHub opened up its own sponsorship program for the development of open source software. This program seems to align more closely with what I do. I already share and manage my code through GitHub, so integrating sponsorship seems to make a lot of sense. It’s worth noting too, that, unlike Patreon, GitHub charges no fees and takes no cut of your contributions. As a result I’ve decided to close my Patreon account by the end of April, and create a GitHub sponsors page.

What does this mean for you?

If you’re a Patreon subscriber and you’d like to keep supporting me, you should cancel your Patreon contribution, then head over to my brand new GitHub sponsors page and sign up! Thanks for your continued support!

If you’d prefer to let your contributions lapse, just do nothing. Your payments will stop when I close the account at the end of April. I understand that circumstances change – thank you so much for your support over the years, and I hope you will continue to make use of the things I create.

If you make use of any of my tools or resources and would like to support their continued development, please think about becoming a sponsor. For a sample of the sorts of things I’ve been working on lately, see my updates feed.

The future!

I’m very excited about the possibilities ahead. The GLAM Workbench has received a lot of attention around the world (including a Research Award from the British Library Labs), and I’m planning some major developments over coming months. And, of course, I won’t forget all my other resources – I spent a lot of time in 2020 migrating databases and platforms to keep everything chugging along.

On my GitHub sponsors page, I’ve set an initial target of 50 sponsors. That might be ambitious, but as I said above, it’s not just about money. Being able to point to a group of people who use and value this work will help me argue for new ways of enabling digital research in the humanities. So please help me spread the word – let’s make things together!

You might have noticed some changes to the GLAM Workbench home page recently. One of the difficulties has always been trying to explain what the GLAM Workbench actually is, so I thought it might be useful to put more examples up front. The home page now lists about 25 notebooks under the headings:

• Finding GLAM data
• Asking different questions
• Hacking heritage
• Bringing documentation alive

Hopefully they give a decent representation of the sorts of things you can do using the GLAM Workbench. I’ve also included a little rotating slideshow built using Slides.com.

Other recent additions include a new Grants and Awards page. #dhhacks