Tim Sherratt - Sharing recent updates and work-in-progress

Tim Sherratt

Sharing recent updates and work-in-progress

14 Jan 2021

Finding non-English newspapers in Trove

There are a growing number of non-English newspapers in Trove, but how do you know what’s there? After trying a few different approaches, I generated a list of 48 newspapers with non-English content. The full details are in this notebook). ...
14 Jan 2021

Open access versions of Australian history articles

Last year I did some analysis of the availability of open access versions of research articles published between 2008 and 2018 in Australian Historical Studies. I’ve now broadened this out to cover all individual articles (with a DOI) acros...
03 Jan 2021

A long thread exploring files in the National Archives of Australia with the access status of ‘closed’. This is the 6th consecutive year I’ve harvested ‘closed’ files on or about 1 January.

03 Jan 2021

More updates from The Real Face of White Australia – running facial detection code over NAA: SP42/1.

03 Jan 2021

16 Dec 2020

GLAM Workbench wins British Library Labs Research Award!

Asking questions with web archives – introductory notebooks for historians has won the British Library Labs Research Award for 2020. The awards recognise ‘exceptional projects that have used the Library’s digital collections and data’. This...
15 Dec 2020

Want to relive the early days of digital humanities in Australia? I’ve archived the websites created for THATCamp Canberra in 2010, 2011, and 2014. They’re now static sites so search and commenting won’t work, but all the content should be there! #dhhacks

15 Dec 2020

The Invisible Australians website has been given a much needed overhaul, and we’ve brought all our related projects together under the title The real face of White Australia. This includes an updated version of the wall of faces. #dhhacks

15 Dec 2020

The GLAM Workbench as research infrastructure (some basic stats)

Repositories in the GLAM Workbench have been launched on Binder 3,529 times since the start of this year (according to data from the Binder Events log). That’s repository launches, not notebooks. Having launched a repository, users might us...
27 Nov 2020

Earlier this year I gave a seminar for the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) introducing the web archives section of the GLAM Workbench. The seminar is now available online: youtu.be/rVidh_wex…

Here are the slides if you want to follow along. #dhhacks

25 Nov 2020

Harvest text from the Australian Women's Weekly!

The Trove Newspaper & Gazette Harvester has been updated to version 0.4.0. The major change is that if the OCRd text for an article isn’t available through the API, it will be automatically downloaded via the web interface. What does this m...
13 Nov 2020

Beyond the copyright cliff of death

If you’ve done any searching in Trove’s digitised newspapers, you’ve probably noticed that there aren’t many results after 1954. This is basically because of copyright restrictions (though given the complexities of Australia’s copyright sys...
13 Nov 2020

Updated! Find Trove newspapers by place of publication by using this simple interface – just click on the map to find the 10 closest newspapers. Now including newspapers added to Trove since June.

You can also browse the locations of all newspapers across Australia.

The underlying data file is available as a spreadsheet. Feel free to add a comment if you notice any problems. I’m geolocating place names found in newspaper titles, so it’s not always exact.

Questions? Ask away at OzGLAM Help. #dhhacks

26 Oct 2020

I’ve added a new section to the GLAM Workbench for the ANU Archives. The first set of notebooks relates to the Sydney Stock exchange stock and share lists. As the content note describes:

These are large format bound volumes of the official lists that were posted up for the public to see - 3 times a day - forenoon, noon and afternoon - at the close of the trading session in the call room at the Sydney Stock Exchange. The closing prices of stocks and shares were entered in by hand on pre-printed sheets.

The volumes have been digitised, resulting in a collection of 70,000+ high resolution images. You can browse the details of each volume using this notebook.

I’ve been exploring ways of getting useful, machine-readable data out of the images. There’s more information about the processes involved in this repository. I’ve also been working on improving the metadata and have managed to assign a date and session (Morning, Noon, or Afternoon) to each page. We these, we can start to explore the content!

One of the notebooks creates a calendar-like view of the whole collection, showing the number of pages surviving from each trading day. This makes it easy to find the gaps and changes in process. #dhhacks

26 Oct 2020

Any regular user of RecordSearch, the National Archives of Australia’s online database, will understand its frustrations. But here’s a handy little hack to fix a couple of annoying problems and add some useful functionality!

The RecordSearch Show Pages userscript updates links to digitised files in search results and item details pages, inserting the number of pages in a file. This means that you can easily scan a list of search results to see where the big fat files are, without having to click through to each one individually.

But wait there’s more! The script also rewrites the link to the digitised file viewer so that it opens in the current tab, as you would expect, and not in an annoying pop up window!

And as an extra bonus if you install now, the script also inserts a link on the barcode of an item in the digitised file viewer that takes you back to the item details page. Links to the digitised file viewer are shareable (unlike most RecordSearch links), but they don’t give you a way to find more information about the item. That problem is also fixed by this handy little script.

For more information see OzGLAM Help. #dhhacks

26 Oct 2020

I’ve added more years to my repository of Commonwealth Hansard! The repository now includes XML-formatted text files for both houses from 1901 to 1980, and 1998 to 2005. I’ve done some more checking and confirmed that the XML files for 1981 to 1997 aren’t currently available through ParlInfo, however, the Parliamentary Library are looking into it. I’ve also created a CSV-formatted list of sitting days from 1901 to 2005 (based on ParlInfo search results). Details of the harvesting process are available in the GLAM Workbench. #dhhacks

26 Oct 2020

It was Open Access Week last week, so I tried a little experiment. How many research articles published in Australian Historical Studies between 2008 and 2018 are available via Open Access? Just 9.5% (23 out of 242). This is despite the fact that all articles published in 2018 or earlier are outside of the journal’s embargo period and Green OA versions could be shared through repositories.

Here’s all the code, it could be easily modified to work with other journals: nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/wr… #dhhacks

24 Sep 2020

The Trove Newspaper and Gazette Harvester has been updated to include the snippet field in the harvested metadata. https://ozglam.chat/t/trove-newspaper-gazette-harvester-updated-to-version-0-3-3/56 #dhhacks

22 Sep 2020

Calling users of Australian galleries, libraries, archives, & museums – OzGLAM Help is now live! Ask a question or simply share your latest discoveries. There’s handy tips, news about recent developments, & links to useful tools. Please use & share! #dhhacks

21 Sep 2020

The Zotero translator for RecordSearch (the National Archives of Australia’s online database) has been updated. There’s many fixes and enhancements — see the full details. #dhhacks

20 Sep 2020

If you try to share or bookmark the url of an item in RecordSearch (the National Archives of Australia’s online database), you’ll often get a ‘Session time out’ error when you access it. That’s because the urls only work within the current active RecordSearch session. So how can you create a shareable link that works across sessions? I’ve created a simple app that helps you create shareable links: recordsearch-links.glitch.me #dhhacks

15 Sep 2020

The Zotero translator for Trove was failing on newspaper articles with tags. I’ve submitted a fix for approval: github.com/zotero/tr…

I’m not sure yet whether the capture of works and search results can be fixed following the Trove redesign. React is not very scraper friendly…

14 Aug 2020

Another #GLAMWorkbench update! Snip words out of @TroveAustralia newspaper pages and create big composite images. OCR art! glam-workbench.github.io/trove-new… #dhhacks

10 Aug 2020

Just in time for #GovHack, I’ve given the Trove API Console a major overhaul. It’s been updated for the latest API versions and has MANY MANY more examples. Explore all the data you can get from @TroveAustralia! troveconsole.herokuapp.com #dhhacks

30 Jul 2020

Ok, so do you want to make your own ‘scissors & paste’ messages using words from @TroveAustralia newspaper articles? Go to the notebook in #GLAMWorkbench & click on ‘Run live on Binder in Appmode’. #dhhacks