Tim Sherratt PRO
Historian and hacker. All the slide decks available here are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Fee free to reuse and share!
Collections
& Contexts
Tim Sherratt · @wragge
Play along!
We're all digital historians now...
NAA WWI service records
WEST Ernest Robert : Service Number - 5091 : Place of Birth - Benambra VIC : Place of Enlistment - Sale VIC : Next of Kin - (Mother) WEST Mrs F M
Name: WEST Ernest Robert
Service Number: 5091
Place of Birth: Benambra VIC
Place of Enlistment: Sale VIC
Next of Kin: (Mother) WEST Mrs F Mstructured data!
The online interface
The big picture
But is this the whole picture?
235,466,138 results!
1915
1954
What are we searching?
New perspectives with data
charts
maps
Putting the history into context using digital collections.
digital skills modules
today
Putting the history into contexts using digital collections.
recontextualising collections
https://www.realfaceofwhiteaustralia.net/faces/
See: Sherratt & Bagnall, 'The people inside' in Seeing the Past with Computers
The Real Face of White Australia
Data repository
What's missing?
-
Search engines lie
-
Relevance is overrated
-
Access is never open
-
Websites are never published
critical approaches to collections
Search engines lie
2022
2011
Trove has a history
Simple or Advanced?
| Query | Results | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| divorce | 1,148,424 | Searches full text |
| title:divorce | 214,800 | Searches headlines only |
Fields or fulltext
| Query | Results | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| white OR australia | 47,406,097 | |
| white australia | 5,617,345 | Same as white AND australia |
| "white australia" | 155,908 | Search for phrase (with stemming) |
| text:"white australia" | 151,707 | Search for phrase (no stemming) |
| "white australia"~0 | 149,762 | Search for phrase (no extra words) |
| text:"white australia"~0 | 146,302 | Search for phrase (no extra words and no stemming) |
De-fuzzify phrases
| Query | Results | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| naturalisation | 239,057 | Stemmed to 'naturalis' |
| naturalization | 14,853,488 | Stemmed to 'natur' |
| text:naturalisation | 126,539 | No stemming |
| text:naturalization | 23,677 | No stemming |
Fun with stemming
searchable?
OCR quality
5.9% of articles
> 70% of family notices have corrections
What gets corrected?
Non-English language content
52 newspapers
340km of records
What's in RecordSearch?
47% of series have no item descriptions
that's 50km of records
...in the file titles of the 37% of records that have been described at item level
Relevance is overrated
Time for a game...
Serendipity?
search Trove from Twitter
Alternatives to search
3,471 Bulletin editorial cartoons
compiled into handy PDFs
One page per day
Hansard interjections
Access is never open
What can I do?
- Open?
- Digitised?
- Copyright restrictions?
- Downloadable?
- Full text?
- Image resolution?
- Machine-readable data?
Seeing what's closed
number of items described in NAA by top-level function
number of items digitised in NAA by top-level function
#redactionart
Websites are never published
How many newspaper articles are in Trove?
You can change things...
- Improve discovery
- Add knowledge
- Build collaborations
containing 1,975,150 items
103,207 Trove lists
Make lists
more than 200 lists about lawnmowers
using 2,201,090 unique tags
9,370,614 tagged items
Add tags
Light
Rail
Research
Society
Australia
Use Zotero to capture data
- Trove newspapers
- National Archives
- Libraries Tasmania
Links break...
so save them now!
404 error
Hack interfaces
Explore!
Need help?
See also...
- Digital tools and such like... (an opinionated list for Australian historians)
- More GLAM tools and interfaces
- Sources of Australian GLAM data
Collections & Contexts
By Tim Sherratt
