October and November brought a flurry of presentations from which I’m still recovering. Here’s a few details and links.

Library of Congress Data Jam

In October, the Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud project at the Library of Congress organised a Data Jam. I was invited to spend a couple of weeks playing around with one of their datasets and to report on the results. I ended up trying to find references to countries in a collection of 90,000 OCRd books. Of course I struck a few problems along the way, and didn’t get nearly as much done as I’d hoped, but that was really part of the point – to find the problems and explore the possibilities. You can watch a video of my presentation, or the whole Data Jam.

You can also:

• View the slides of my presentation
• Examine the Jupyter notebooks I used to process the data
• Explore the data I extracted using Datasette
• Play with a simple app based on the extracted data
• View the app code

Wikimedia Australia Community Meeting

Thanks to a grant from Wikimedia Australia, I’ve been able to spend some time this year working to align information about government agencies in Wikidata with details from the National Archives of Australia’s RecordSearch database. You can read about the project in this blog post. In November, I gave a report on the project at Wikimedia Australia’s monthly Community Meeting. You can watch the video on YouTube. You can also explore the new Wikidata section of the GLAM Workbench.

Everyday Heritage workshop and symposium

November also brought the first of what will be a series of annual symposia relating to the ARC-funded Everyday Heritage project. On 9 November, Kate Bagnall and I ran a Connecting People and Place workshop at the University of Canberra. We walked participants through some ways of finding and using digital collections such as Trove, and worked with them to create projects based on their own research using StoryMapJS and CollectionBuilder. You can view the slides of my Trove tips & tricks presentation. In preparation for the workshop I also created a new notebook in the GLAM Workbench that converts a Trove List into a Collection Builder exhibition.

The following day the Everyday Heritage Symposium, Connecting digital archives people & place, was held at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra. You can view the slides from my presentation Access to the everyday through digital collections. You can also watch a video of the full symposium.

Building DH

On 15 November I took part in a panel discussion on Designing user-friendly Platforms and Toolkits for Digital Humanities as part of the Building DH online conference. You can watch the video of the session on YouTube.

CAPOS 2022

On 16 November I gave the feature presentation at Reviewing, Revising, and Refining Open Social Scholarship: Australasia, and event organised by the Canadian-Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship. My talk, ‘DIY Infrastructure – Building the GLAM Workbench’, described work I’ve been doing over the past year or so to make the GLAM Workbench more sustainable by automating and standardising basic tasks, and integrating it with a range of existing services and tools. You can view the video of my talk, or browse the slides.

Worlds of Wikimedia 2022

Finally, on 17 November, I gave a keynote presentation at the Worlds of Wikimedia Conference. My talk, ‘Portals, platforms, and participation: building online collaboration around GLAM collections’, revisited my Portals to platforms paper from 2014, looking at ways that people can engage and create in the space around GLAM collections. You can view my slides online.