As well as tools and code, the GLAM Workbench includes a number of pre-harvested datasets for researchers to play with. But just including a link to a CSV file in GitHub or Zenodo isn’t very useful – it doesn’t help researchers understand w...
The hardest part of developing tools and resources like the GLAM Workbench is getting information about them to the people who might benefit. The collapse of Twitter has only added to the difficulty, as has the reluctance of GLAM organisati...
The National Library of Australia holds over 55,000 hours of oral history and folklore recordings dating back to the 1950s. This collection is being made available online, and many recordings can now be listened to using Trove’s audio playe...
Trove uses codes from the MARC Geographic Areas list to identify locations in metadata records. I couldn’t find any mappings of these codes to other sources of geospatial information, so I fired up OpenRefine and reconciled the geographic a...
In 2023 the National Archives of Australia digitised 416,602 files (down from 575,597 in 2022). This chart shows the number of files digitised per day in 2023.
These files were drawn from 1,423 different series, but the vast bulk (81%) were...
I’ve been capturing weekly snapshots of the Trove newspaper corpus for the last couple of years. You can see the latest results in the Trove Newspaper Data Dashboard. Using this data I’ve compiled a quick summary of changes over the last ye...
I’m continuing to slog away at the Trove Data Guide (part of the ARDC’s HASS Community Data Lab) – dumping everything I know about Trove into a format that I hope will be useful for researchers.
I’ve just finished a first pass through the s...
Version 3 of the Trove API is out, and version 2 is scheduled to be decommissioned in early 2023 – that means I have a lot of code to update! First cab of the rank is the Trove Newspaper & Gazette Harvester with version 0.7.1 now available....
There are a number of different ways to run the Jupyter notebooks in the GLAM Workbench depending on your needs and technical skills. But the easiest and quickest has always been the public, international Binder service, based in Europe. On...
I’ve just updated the Trove Query Parser to work with version 3 of the Trove API. You just give it the url of a search in Trove’s newspapers, and it translates the search into a set of parameters that the API will understand. So this:
parse...
It’s Family History Month, so I thought a brief post was in order describing some of the family history related resources in the GLAM Workbench.
GLAM Name Index Search This is the biggie (in more ways than one). I’ve brought 263 datasets fr...
In early June I pinned a “nobody’s home” post to my profile and said goodbye to Twitter. After 15 years, I was sad to leave behind friends and colleagues, but glad to get away from the hate, the nazis, and the transphobes. I hadn’t been pos...
Way back in 2012, I used the brand new Trove API to download the details of 4 million articles published on the front pages of newspapers. I did it for two reasons: first, I wanted to see how the content of front pages changed over time; an...
The Trove API Console provides examples of the Trove API in action that you can run, edit, and share. It’s been online for 9 years now, and I’ve just updated it to use version 3 of the Trove API by default. I’ve also added a new ‘Share’ but...
The ARDC has started work on the development of a HASS Community Data Lab to support digital research in the humanities. I’m part of the team of contractors, and my work package is focused on the development of a Trove Data Guide. My aim is...
The NSW State Archives (now part of Museums of History NSW) publishes a series of useful indexes to its collections. The indexes include basic data transcribed from the records, such as names, dates, and places, providing fine-grained acces...
There have been quite a few GLAM Workbench updates over the last month, here’s some notes. (See February’s update for more recent changes…)
General developments After many months of work, all thirteen Trove repositories within the GLAM Wor...
Once again I’ve gotten a bit behind in noting GLAM Workbench updates, so here’s a quick catch up on some Trove-related changes from the last couple of months.
Trove API introduction The section that introduces the Trove API (or APIs!) hasn’...
Back in 2017, I worked with students from my ‘Exploring Digital Heritage’ class at the University of Canberra to develop and launch a site to transcribe records from the National Archives of Australia relating to the administration of the W...
October and November brought a flurry of presentations from which I’m still recovering. Here’s a few details and links.
Library of Congress Data Jam In October, the Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud project at the Library of Congress...
The Australian History Industry was published recently. Edited by Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, the book ‘explores the complex, multi-roomed house of Australian history’, exploring academic, school, and public history, the impact of digit...
Catching up on some software package updates over the last few months.
The trove-newspaper-harvester package is now at v0.6.5. Recent changes include:
Fix to handle articles with missing metadata Don’t try to re-download existing text and ...
The Trove Newspaper Harvester has been around in different forms for more than a decade. It helps you download all the articles in a Trove newspaper search, opening up new possibilities for large-scale analysis. You can use it as a command-...
A few weeks ago I created a new search interface to the NSW Post Office Directories from 1886 to 1950. Since then, I’ve used the same process on the Sydney Telephone Directories from 1926 to 1954. Both of these publications had been digitis...
I’ve updated the GLAM Workbench’s harvest of OCRd text from Trove’s digitised periodicals. This is a completely fresh harvest, so should include any corrections made in recent months. It includes:
1,430 periodicals OCRd text from 41,645 is...
