Tim Sherratt

Sharing recent updates and work-in-progress

glamworkbench

30 Aug 2021

Government publications in Trove

Over the last few weeks I’ve been updating my harvests of OCRd text from digitised books and periodicals in Trove. As part of the harvesting process, I’ve created lists of both that are available in digital form – this includes digitised wo...
26 Aug 2021

GLAM Workbench – a platform for digital HASS research

We’re in the midst of planning for the HASS Research Data Commons, which will deliver some much-needed investment in digital research infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences. Amongst the funded programs are tools for text anal...
23 Aug 2021

A Family History Month experiment – search millions of name records from GLAM organisations

There’s a lot of rich historical data contained within the indexes that Australian GLAM organisations provide to help people navigate their records. These indexes, often created by volunteers, allow access by key fields such as name, date o...
16 Aug 2021

Explore Trove’s digitised books

The Trove books section of the GLAM Workbench has been updated! There’s freshly-harvested data, as well as updated Python packages, integration with Reclaim Cloud, and automated Docker builds. Included is a notebook to harvest details of al...
13 Aug 2021

A miscellany of ephemera, oddities, & estrays

I’m just in the midst of updating my harvest of OCRd text from Trove’s digitised books (more about that soon!). But amongst the items catalogued as ‘books’ are a wide assortment of ephemera, posters, advertisements, and other oddities. Ther...
09 Aug 2021

Everyday heritage and the GLAM Workbench

Some good news on the funding front with the success of the Everyday Heritage project in the latest round of ARC Linkage grants. The project aims to look beyond the formal discourses of ‘national’ heritage to develop a more diverse range of...
06 Aug 2021

Recent GLAM Workbench presentations

So far this year I’ve given eight workshops or presentations relating to the GLAM Workbench, with probably a few more yet to come. Here’s the latest: Introducing the GLAM Workbench, presentation for the Griffith University Centre for Socia...
06 Aug 2021

Updated! Lots and lots of text freshly harvested from Trove periodicals

For a few years now I’ve been harvesting downloadable text from digitised periodicals in Trove and making it easily available for exploration and research. I’ve just completed the latest harvest – here’s the summary: 1,163 digitised period...
02 Aug 2021

New dataset – Politicians talking about COVID

The Trove Journals section of the GLAM Workbench includes a notebook that helps you download press releases, speeches, and interview transcripts by Australian federal politicians. These documents are compiled and published by the Parliament...
14 Jul 2021

8 million Trove tags to explore!

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 taggi...
01 Jul 2021

Integrating GLAM Workbench news and discussion

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 questio...
01 Jul 2021

GLAM Workbench now on YouTube!

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 in...
28 Jun 2021

GLAM Workbench office hours

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? ...
21 Jun 2021

QueryPic: The Next Generation

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...
21 Jun 2021

Everyone gets a Lab!

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 suppo...
14 Jun 2021

Minor change to Reclaim Cloud config

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 in...
14 Jun 2021

Trove Query Parser

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...
13 Jun 2021

Some GLAM Workbench stats

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 rand...
13 Jun 2021

More Reclaim Cloud integrations!

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 ...
13 Jun 2021

Get your GLAM datasets here!

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 ...
24 May 2021

NAA RecordSearch section of the GLAM Workbench updated!

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 ...
17 May 2021

Web archives section of GLAM Workbench updated!

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 hoo...
12 May 2021

Using web archives to find out when newspapers were added to Trove

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 a...
12 May 2021

GLAM Jupyter Resources

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
12 May 2021

Running notebooks – a sign of things to come in the GLAM Workbench

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. ...