Counting down... (to the end of my SLV residency)
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. Here’s the blurb:
More and more GLAM organisations are looking to share their data to foster creativity and support new types of research. But how can you help potential users understand the possibilities of your data? This workshop will explore how GLAM organisations can create and share resources that encourage experimentation.
The GLAM Workbench is a large collection of tools, hacks, and tutorials aimed at helping researchers make use of collection data. It uses platforms such as Jupyter notebooks to create live, working examples that run in your browser without additional software. Similar repositories of computational resources are being developed by GLAM organisations around the world.
This workshop will introduce the technologies and standards used in the GLAM Workbench, such as Jupyter notebooks. It will provide an overview of related activity around the world, including best practice guidelines for GLAM organisations developing computational resources. It will explain how organisations and individuals can contribute content to the GLAM Workbench, or use it as a model to create their own specialised workbenches.
Sharing data is important, but so is sharing skills, tools, and knowledge. Come along to find out how the GLAM Workbench can help.
It’s a free, hybrid event (in person and online) and will run from 1.00-3.00pm. A sign up page should be available soon.
On Wednesday 3 December I’m presenting the results of my residency in a ‘technologist’s talk’. It’s an internal event, but it’s in the public ‘Create quarter’ of the Library, so I think anyone can pop in. Hopefully there’ll be a video I can share.
To give you an idea of what I’ll be talking about, here’s some of the outcomes so far:
- hacking the library workshop (slides, and blog post about urls)
- bounding boxes for parish maps (blog post, code)
- geolocating the Committee for Urban Action collection of photographs (prototype interface, still documenting the method)
- a new fully-searchable version of the Sands & MacDougall’s directories (blog post, database, and another blog post)
- georeferencing digitised maps – over 500 so far! (documentation, dashboard, data repository, blog post)
- and as of yesterday, 3,000+ geolocated newspapers (documentation and interface coming!)
At the moment I’m trying to bring it all together in a new interface that let’s you type in an address and find collection materials relating to your home, your street, and your suburb. Only two weeks to go! Eeek!
