There’s no reliable way of downloading an image of a Trove newspaper article from the web interface. The image download option produces an HTML page with embedded images, and the article is often sliced into pieces to fit the page. This Python package includes tools to download articles as complete JPEG images. If an article is printed across multiple newspaper pages, multiple images will be downloaded – one for each page.
Two more datasets have been added to the GLAM Name Index Search! From the History Trust of South Australia and Collab, I’ve added: Passengers in History – that’s 371,894 records of people arriving in South Australia from 1836 to 1961 Women’s Suffrage Petition 1894 (South Australia) – another 10,638 names In total there’s 9.67 million name records to search across 197 datasets provided by 9 GLAM organisations!
Here’s the preprint version of an article, ‘More than newspapers’, that I’ve submitted for a forum about Trove in a forthcoming issue of History Australia.
Recently I created a list of publications that made use of QueryPic, my tool to visualise searches in Trove’s digitised newspapers. Here’s another example of the GLAM Workbench and QueryPic in action, in Professor Julian Meyrick’s recent keynote lecture, ‘Looking Forward to the 1950s: A Hauntological Method for Investigating Australian Theatre History’.
Late last year the Federal Government announced it was making an $8.9 million investment in HASS and Indigenous research infrastructure. This program is being managed by the ARDC and will lead to the development of a HASS Research Data Commons. According to the ARDC, a research data commons: brings together people, skills, data, and related resources such as storage, compute, software, and models to enable researchers to conduct world class data-intensive research
A Twitter thread about some of the research uses of QueryPic… QueryPic, my tool for visualising searches in @TroveAustralia’s digitised newspapers, has been around in different forms for more than 10 years. The latest version is part of the #GLAMWorkbench: https://t.co/qnY5tVDwgY #researchinfrastructure pic.twitter.com/QyHWJwGV3u — Tim Sherratt (@wragge) August 29, 2021 I thought I’d highlight some of the research publications that have made use of QueryPic over the years, so, in no particular order.
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 works, as well as those that are born-digital (such as PDFs or epubs). I’ve published the full lists of books and periodicals as searchable databases to make them easy to explore.
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 analysis as part of the Linguistics Data Commons, and a platform for more advanced research using Trove. I’m hoping that this will be an opportunity to take stock of existing tools and resources, and build flexible pathways for researchers that enable them to collect, move, analyse, preserve, and share data across different platforms and services.
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 or location. They aid discovery, but also allow new forms of analysis and visualisation. Kate Bagnall and I wrote about some of the possibilities, and the difficulties, in this recently published article. Many of these indexes can be downloaded from government data portals.
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 all books available from Trove in digital form. This includes both digitised books, that have been scanned and OCRd, as well as born digital publications, such as PDFs and epubs. The definition of ‘books’ is pretty loose – I’ve harvested details of anything that has been assigned the format ‘Book’ in Trove, but this includes ephemera, such as posters, pamphlets, and advertising.
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. There’s no consistent way of identifying these items through the search interface, but because I’ve found the number of pages in each ‘book’ as part of the harvesting process, I can limit results to items with just a single digitised page – there’s more than 1,500!
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 heritage narratives. Working at the intersection of place, digital collections, and material culture, team members will develop a series of ‘heritage biographies’, that document everyday experience, and provide new models for the heritage sector.
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 Social and Cultural Research, Digital Humanities Seminar Series, 6 August 2021 Exploring the GLAM Workbench (slides), presentation for the UTS Digital Histories Seminar Series, 8 July 2021 The GLAM Workbench: A Labs approach?
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 periodicals had text available for download Text was downloaded from 51,928 individual issues Adding up to a total of around 12gb of text If you want to dive straight in, here’s a list of all the harvested periodicals, with links to download a summary of available issues, as well as all the harvested text (there’s one file per issue).
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 Parliamentary Library, and the details are regularly harvested into Trove. Using this notebook, I’ve created a collection of documents that include the words ‘COVID’ or ‘Coronavirus’. It includes all the metadata from Trove, as well as the full text of each document downloaded from the Parliamentary Library.
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’.
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!
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.
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!
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.