Tim Sherratt

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.

It’s January 1, the day each year when our minds turn to newly released Cabinet records from @naagovau. But while the media focuses on the records that have been made open, I’ll be spending the day looking at those that were closed. What weren’t you allowed to see in 2020?

— Tim Sherratt (@wragge) January 1, 2021

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

Finished! NAA: SP42/1 is a general correspondence series from the Collector of Customs in Sydney. It includes many files relating to the administration of the White Australia Policy. 3,375 files have been digitised (about 20% of the series), that’s 49,781 digital images. https://t.co/Y1ZoAYSXeP

— Tim Sherratt (@wragge) December 30, 2020

I reharvested NAA: ST84/1 and ended up with 14,545 images from 461 digitised files (about 17% of the total series).

In these images I found 9,970 faces – this is a couple of thousand more than when I used OpenCV in 2010/11 for the original wall of faces. https://t.co/BAnkX7u83S

— Tim Sherratt (@wragge) December 27, 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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…