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.
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 creation – construct your search in the Trove web interface, then just copy and paste the url into QueryPic. This means you can take advantage of Trove’s advanced search and facets to build complex queries.
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 support researchers who want to make use of web archives. My ‘lab’ doesn’t have a physical presence, or an institutional home, but it does provide a starting point for researchers, and with the latest Reclaim Cloud and Docker integrations, everyone can have their own web archives lab!
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 independent of the Docker image used to run Jupyter, so it’s a handy place to copy things if you ever want to update the Docker image. However, I just realised that there was a permissions problem with the work directory which meant you couldn’t write files to it from within Jupyter.
I’ve been working on an essay for publication in a forthcoming edited collection. I wanted to explore how the practice of history in Australia had been changed by GLAM organisations making their collections available online – both the new possibilities that had emerged, and the problems that remained. In the end I focused on three areas – discovery, digitisation, and research infrastructure. If you’re interested, I’ve shared a preprint on Zenodo.
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 parameters are used both in the web interface and the API, there are a lot of variations – this package means you don’t have to keep track of all the differences!
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 random clicks, these numbers represent the number of times users started new computing sessions using the GLAM Workbench. I just compiled these stats for the past year, and I was very pleased to see that the Web Archives section has been launched over 1,000 times in the past twelve months!
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 launch your very own version of these GLAM Workbench repositories in the cloud, where all your downloads and experiments will be saved! Find out more on the Using Reclaim Cloud page.
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 download all the metadata. For more more information see the data portals section of the GLAM Workbench.
If you’re interested in finding out what’s inside all those 684 CVS files, take the GLAM CSV Explorer for a spin!
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 installation on Reclaim Cloud. There’s also a few new notebooks.
New notebooks and datasets Harvest details of all series in RecordSearch – get details of all series registered in RecordSearch, also generates a summary dataset with the total number of items digitised, described and in each access category Exploring harvested series data – generates some basic statistics from the harvest of series data Summary data about all series in RecordSearch (15mb CSV) – contains basic descriptive information about all the series currently registered on RecordSearch (May 2021) as well as the total number of items described, digitised, and in each access category Updated I’ve started (but not completed) updating all the notebooks in this repository to use my new RecordSearch Data Scraper.
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 hood. If you haven’t used it before, the Web Archives section contains 16 notebooks providing documentation, tools, apps, and examples to help you make use of web archives in your research. The notebooks are grouped by the following topics: Types of data, Harvesting data and creating datasets, and Exploring change over time.
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 added all the time.
In an attempt to chart the development of Trove, I’ve created a dataset that shows (approximately) when particular newspaper titles were first added. This gives a rough snapshot of what Trove contained at any point in the last 12 years.
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
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.
I’m still rolling out this functionality across all the repositories, but it’s going to take a while. When I’m finished you’ll be able to create your own persistent environment on Reclaim Cloud from any repository with just the click of a button.
As I foreshadowed some weeks ago, I’ve shut down my Patreon page. Thanks to everyone who has supported me there over the last few years!
I’ve now shifted across to GitHub Sponsors, which is focused on supporting open source projects. This seems like a much better fit for the things that I do, which are all free and open by default.
So if you think things like the GLAM Workbench, Historic Hansard, OzGLAM Help, and The Real Face of White Australia are worth supporting, you can sign up using my GitHub Sponsors page.
I’ve updated, refreshed, and reorganised the Trove newspapers section of the GLAM Workbench. There’s currently 22 Jupyter notebooks organised under the following headings:
Trove newspapers in context – Notebooks in this section look at the Trove newspaper corpus as a whole, to try and understand what’s there, and what’s not. Visualising searches – Notebooks in this section demonstrate some ways of visualising searches in Trove newspapers – seeing everything rather than just a list of search results.
It was way back in 2009 that I created my first scraper for getting machine-readable data out of the National Archives of Australia’s online database, RecordSearch. Since then I’ve used versions of this scraper in a number of different projects such as The Real Face of White Australia, Closed Access, and Redacted (including the recent update). The scraper is also embedded in many of the notebooks that I’ve created for the RecordSearch section of the GLAM Workbench.
Here’s the video of my presentation, ‘Secrets and lies’, for the (Re)create symposium at the University of Canberra, 21 April 2021. It’s mainly about finding and resting redactions in ASIO surveillance files held by the National Archives of Australia.
Secrets and lives from Tim Sherratt on Vimeo.
Here are links to the various sites and resources mentioned in the video:
For more on records relating to the White Australia policy see The Real Face of White Australia Some summary information on ASIO records in the National Archives of Australia Jenny Holzer’s Mass MoCA exhibition, including redaction paintings CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years, The Onion, 2005 Fun with the Petrovs, a Trove list that brings together photos from ASIO files in the NAA FOIA Facelift, MuckRock, 2020 Redaction Hall of Shame, MuckRock, 2016 Withheld Pending Advice, Inside Story, 2017, looks at ‘closed’ files in the NAA; the 2020 update is in this Twitter thread redacted, 2017 – browse my original collection of redactions The original #redactionart story, 2016-2017 – part 1 and part 2 The Redaction Zoo, 2017 DIY #redactionart , 2017 – repository of images Edward Shaddow’s #redactionart cookie cutters Wearing access, 2018, talk by Bonnie Wildie describing the creation of her #redactionart dress #redactionart jigsaw Some new #redactionart critters, 2021 #redactionart hardcover journal, 2021, Redbubble #redactionart quilt cover, 2021, Redbubble #redactionart scarf, 2021, Redbubble DIY #redactionart collage – make your own collages of recycled ASIO redactions (includes at least one redaction art critter) I haven’t yet written up the details of training my latest redaction finder.