GLAM workbench: Possibilities of collection data for research, experimentation, and collaboration

Workshop held at the University of Melbourne Digital Studio, 15 August 2019 GLAM collections hold important data for research in the humanities and an increasing number of institutions are opening up collection data for public use through APIs. To help researchers make the most of the possibilities for using large-scale collection data, Dr Tim Sherratt has created GLAM workbench. Using Jupyter notebooks to combine live code with worked examples and tutorials, the GLAM workbench can help non-technical users harvest bulk data from Trove or analyse series from the National Archives of Australia. The workbench is an ongoing experiment, evolving as Tim learns more about the technology and explores different approaches. In this workshop Tim will demonstrate the possibilities of the GLAM workbench. Participants will be guided in using Jupyter notebooks for both the harvesting of collection data and through some examples of using it for analysis

Unremembering the forgotten

<p>Keynote presented at DH2015, the annual conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisation, Sydney, 3 July 2015.</p

Hacking heritage: exploring the limits of access

Invited webinar presentation in the Swedish National Heritage Board's #OpenGLAMNow series, 25 November 2019. Access is constructed by technology, by history, by funding, by institutional practices, by commercial interests. Hacking GLAM collections is a way of understanding how they’ve been constructed, of exploring their limits, and, if there are problems, of finding possible workarounds

GLAM collections as data

What becomes possible when you start working with the collections of Australian libraries, archives, and museums as data? This is an introduction to digital research using GLAM collections for researchers in the humanities and social sciences.Invited presentation for the HUSS Data Forum, Latrobe University, 31 July 2019

Life on the outside: connections, contexts, and the wild, wild web

Invited keynote presentation for the Japanese Association of Digital Humanities conference in Tsukuba, 20 September 2014. What’s important is not training users to understand the context of our collections, but helping them explore and understand their responsibilities to the pasts those collections represent. Let’s remove technical barriers, minimise legal restrictions, and trust in the good will of our audiences. Instead of building shrines to our descriptive methodologies, let’s create systems that provide stable shareable anchors, that connect, but don’t constrain. Contexts will flow and mingle, some will fade and some will burn. Contexts will survive not because we demand it in our terms of service, or embed them in our interfaces, but because they capture something that matters. The ways we find and use cultural collections will continue to change, but questions about responsibility, value, and meaning will remain

'A map and some pins': open data and unlimited horizons

Invited keynote presentation The glories of messiness challenge the extractive metaphors that often characterise our use of digital data. We’re not merely digging or mining or drilling for oil, because each journey into the data offers new possibilities — our horizons are opened, because our categories refuse to be closed. These are journeys of enrichment, interpretation and creation, not extraction. We’re putting stuff back, not taking it out. Cultural institutions have an exciting opportunity to help us work with this messiness. The challenge is not just to pump out data, anyone can do that. The challenge is to enrich the contexts within which we meet this data — to help us embrace nuance and uncertainty; to prevent us from taking the categories we use for granted

'The badge of the outsider': Open access and closed boundaries

Access is never simply ‘open’, it’s a struggle for meaning, power, and value. I’m interested in using digital tools to see collections differently, to create opportunities for reflection and resistance. From Australia’s racist immigration policies, to the encroachments of state surveillance, I’ll be exploring how digital access changes the types of questions we can ask of the past.Invited presentation to Sharing is Caring 2017, 20 November 2017, in Aarhus, Denmark

Exploring collections through the GLAM Workbench

Keynote presentation for the XVIII CONGRÉS D'ARXVÍSTICA I GESTIÓ DE DOCUMENTS DE CATALUNYA, May 2021. More and more institutions in the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) are sharing their collection data, but how do you encourage researchers to explore these possibilities? How do you help them make use of your data? The GLAM Workbench aims to build the skills and confidence of researchers, by sharing a wide range of tools and examples that work with real collection data. This presentation will explore the thinking behind the GLAM Workbench and possibilities for future development

Hacking Heritage: Understanding the Limits of Online Access

As cultural heritage collections become available online they carry the promise of ‘access’ – new audiences, new uses, new understandings. But access is never simply open. Limits are imposed, structures are defined, categories are created. Decisions are made about what gets digitised and why. This chapter will describe a series of experiments within online cultural heritage collections to investigate the meaning of access. What happens, for example, if we invert the usual processes of discovery and focus on records in the National Archives of Australia that have been withheld from public view? What does our history look like if we restrict our gaze only to resources that have been digitised? By manipulating the contexts of cultural heritage collections we can start to see their limits and biases. By hacking heritage we can move beyond search interfaces and image galleries to develop an understanding of what’s missing