Course
Heritage Hack Connections

A workshop to get people thinking about the possibilities of cultural heritage data in the lead up to GovHack 2016.

Play time

I like to start off workshops with a quick round of Headline Roulette both because it’s fun (I hope) and because it gets us thinking about different ways we might use and explore cultural heritage data. In this case, Headline Roulette is drawing information about digitised newspaper articles from the Trove API.

• Or cats…
• Make your own version of Headline Roulette!

Hacking heritage?

GovHack is an open data competition – people get together and build stuff. But what’s a ‘hack’ and how can we apply the concept to cultural heritage data? How do we explore new contexts and frame interesting questions?

• GovHack
• Sign up now for UC Heritage Hack!
• GovHack Develop Toolkit

Where’s the data?

• GovHack Data portal – try searching for history, heritage, library, archive
  • Tasmanian divorces
  • Queensland tuberculosis admissions
• Australian Data Archive – includes historical census data, 1833-1901!
• Museum of Victoria API
• More to come!
• My pre-harvested data – a small (and slightly weird) collection of stuff I’ve packaged up.

Trove

One API, 400 million records.

• Building with Trove
• GovHack Tips and Tricks
• Trove API Console
• And then there’s the people data…
• Or the low-code option – DIY Trove Exhibitions

But what’s missing?

But there are always gaps and biases. How can we avoid simply reinforcing existing perspectives?

• Newspaper articles by year
• Loom – checkout the iceberg view
• Closed Access – what are we not allowed to see
• The Hansard black hole…
• #fundTrove – and then there’s ‘engagement’

DIY Datasets

We shouldn’t be content with what we’re given. Assembling our own datasets gives us more insight into their contents and contexts. It’s also useful for offline analysis.

• Trove Harvester
• Harvesting front pages of the Gadfly
• Harvesting the John Ellis photos from University of Melbourne Archives (coming soon!)
• Trove Proxy – for newspaper pdfs and httpsifying your queries
• ASIO files – an example of how to harvest files from a series (as long as there’s less than 20,000 of them)

Texts

Data doesn’t just come delivered via spreadsheets and APIs. Digitised texts can be explored for patterns and possibilities.

• Heavy metal and NLP
• MoAD Election Speeches
• In a word – using ABCRN data
• Diggers Diaries – using SLNSW transcribed diaries
• Historic Hansard and documentation – with Voyant & Hypothes.is integration
• Texts to play with:
  • Biodiversity Heritage Library Australian collection – with API and data downloads!
  • Trove – try the nla.obj or Trove Digital Library searches

Images

Digital images are also data – what new perspectives can we extract from them?

• Finding open images in Trove – you can also try Seabo!
• Flickr Commons – several Australian institutions
• Tate explorer – navigating by colour
• Finding faces – The Real Face of White Australia, Eyes on the Past, Vintage Face Depot

No to low code

Some tools you can start building with straight away.

• Open Refine – clean your dirty data
• Hypothes.is – web scale annotation and collaboration
• Plot.ly – embeddable charts
• CartoDB – cool maps
• Odyssey.js, StoryMap – combining maps and stories
• Voyant Tools – powerful and playful text analysis tools
• GitHub pages – free web publishing
• Slides – more than just presentations? (Uses Reveal.js)
• Twine – tell a story, make a game