Updates to the Trove Newspapers section of GLAM Workbench
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...Introducing the new, improved RecordSearch Data Scraper!
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 proj...Secrets and lives
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...Recently digitised files in the National Archives of Australia
I’m interested in understanding what gets digitised and when by our cultural institutions, but accessible data is scarce. The National Archives of Australia lists ‘newly scanned' records in RecordSearch, so I thought I’d see if I could conv...Moving on from Patreon...
Over the last few years, I’ve been very grateful for the support of my Patreon subscribers. Financially, their contributions have helped me cover a substantial proportion of the cloud hosting costs associated with projects like Historic Han...What can you do with the GLAM Workbench?
You might have noticed some changes to the GLAM Workbench home page recently. One of the difficulties has always been trying to explain what the GLAM Workbench actually is, so I thought it might be useful to put more examples up front. The ...Reclaim Cloud integration coming soon to the GLAM Workbench
I’ve been doing a bit of work behind the scenes lately to prepare for a major update to the GLAM Workbench. My plan is to provide one click installation of any of the GLAM Workbench repositories on the Reclaim Cloud platform. This will prov...Some recent GLAM Workbench presentations
I’ve given a couple of talks lately on the GLAM Workbench and some of my other work relating to the construction of online access to GLAM collections. Videos and slides are available for both: From collections as data to collections as inf...Some GLAM Workbench datasets to explore for Open Data Day
It was Open Data Day on Saturday 6 March – here’s some of the ready-to-go datasets you can find in the GLAM Workbench – there’s something for historians, humanities researchers, teachers & more! First here’s a list of Australian GLAM (tha...Zotero translator for NAA RecordSearch updated
The recent change of labels from ‘Barcode' to ‘ItemID’ in the National Archives of Australia’s RecordSearch database broke the Zotero translator. I’ve now updated the translator, and the new version has been merged into the Zotero translato...TroveNewsBot upgraded – now sharing articles published 'on this day'!
@TroveNewsBot has been sharing Trove newspaper articles on Twitter for over 7 years. With its latest upgrade the bot now has an ‘on this day’ function. Every day at AEST9.00am, TroveNewsBot will share an article published on that day in the...The NAA recently changed field labels in RecordSearch, so that ‘Barcode' is now ‘Item ID’. This required an update to my recordsearch_tools screen scraper. I also had to make a few changes in the RecordSearch section of the GLAM Workbench. #dhhacks
Open access publishing for Australian historians
After some recent investigations of the availability of open access versions of articles published in paywalled Australian history journals, I’ve started a Google doc to capture useful links and information for Australian historians wanting...Who was linking to Trove newspapers in 2014?
In 2014 I pulled together a sample of web pages that included links back to digitised newspaper articles in Trove and created the ‘Trove Traces’ app. It was interesting, and sometimes disturbing, to see the diversity of sites that made use ...New! DigitalNZ API Query Builder added to GLAM Workbench
I’ve added an API Query Builder to the DigitalNZ section of the GLAM Workbench. You can use it to learn about the different parameters available from the search API, and experiment with different queries. Just get your API key from DigitalN...OpenGLAM fireworks! Finding open collections in DigitalNZ
Lately I’ve been updating and expanding the notebooks in the DigitalNZ section of the GLAM Workbench. In particular, I’ve been looking at the usage facet to understand how much of the aggregated content is ‘open’. What do I mean by ‘open’? ...Easy browsing of Trove newspapers with these keyboard shortcuts!
If you like browsing Trove’s digitised newspapers page by page, you might have found that the current interface is a bit clunky. To move between pages you have to hover over the page number and click on ‘Next’ or ‘Previous’. Wouldn’t it be ...New dataset and notebooks – twenty years of ABC Radio National
There’s a new GLAM Workbench section for working with data from Trove’s Music & Sound zone! Inside you’ll find out how to harvest all the metadata from ABC Radio National program records – that’s 400,000+ records, from 160 Radio National pr...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). ...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...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).
— Tim Sherratt (@wragge) December 27, 2020
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