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.
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.