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
GLAM Workbench wins British Library Labs Research Award!
Asking questions with web archives – introductory notebooks for historians has won the British Library Labs Research Award for 2020. The awards recognise ‘exceptional projects that have used the Library’s digital collections and data’. This...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
The GLAM Workbench as research infrastructure (some basic stats)
Repositories in the GLAM Workbench have been launched on Binder 3,529 times since the start of this year (according to data from the Binder Events log). That’s repository launches, not notebooks. Having launched a repository, users might us...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
Harvest text from the Australian Women's Weekly!
The Trove Newspaper & Gazette Harvester has been updated to version 0.4.0. The major change is that if the OCRd text for an article isn’t available through the API, it will be automatically downloaded via the web interface. What does this m...Beyond the copyright cliff of death
If you’ve done any searching in Trove’s digitised newspapers, you’ve probably noticed that there aren’t many results after 1954. This is basically because of copyright restrictions (though given the complexities of Australia’s copyright sys...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
