Hey Everyone,
This one is a long one so I’ll pop it beneath a ‘read more’ tab.
Enjoy!
This week was all about putting the content of digital history collections into the public domain and the ways in which this is done.
Much of what we looked at this week used the National Library of Australia’s digitised collection, Trove, as a data source. As a result the perspective given on digital history collections in the public collection came from an Australian angle. A lot of our lecturer’s work was also looked at, ‘onya Tim!
We started off looking at Trove Traces, a website created by Tim that looks at where Trove was being used and cited around the web. Unsurprisingly a lot of the results on Trove Traces were personal project blogs on varying Australian history topics. Though we looked at Know That Property, a site that delves into the history of numerous properties around history, I found the site Free Settler or Felon to be worth noting. The site uses Trove to compile information on notable people – Convicts, Settlers, Townsfolk, Bushrangers, Aborigines, Innkeepers, Soldiers, Land Owners, Medical Practitioners and Magistrates – who lived in the Hunter Valley and in Newcastle during the 19th century. Both sites are similar in how they compile information about a small region, however Know Your Property is focused on housing and infrastructure where Free Settlers or Felons feels more comprehensive as it profiles a region during a set period. Both sites also let you interact with them by entering in search terms, making specific knowledge from Trove accessible to the public.
We then looked into crowdsourcing as a way of getting involved with collections. Of the three sites we explored, Zooniverse, Measuring the ANZACS, and AnnoTate, one reallt stood out to me. AnnoTate is a site that allows people to transcribe documents from the Tate collection. Though it’s set up as a ‘volunteer’ project, I found it to be more like a game or something to waste some time without the guilt of doing nothing or something unproductive. The experience was fantastic, you could do as little or as much as you liked and during the process the general feeling of discovering kept me motivated to keep going to find and contribute more. Measuring the ANZACs had a similar concept however I didn’t enjoy the user interface as much as it confines you to a word or sentence compared with AnnoTate that lets you pick and choose what on the page you want to transcribe.
I think this comes back to what Tim was saying with paths v sandboxes, “Paths guide you along a particular journey, while sandboxes encourage open-ended exploration”. I enjoyed AnnoTate more because it allowed me to go at my own pace, picking and choosing what I wanted to transcribe, and in the process played on that sense of wonder and discovery. In the end if digital heritage can play on those senses – which I’m sure they can because history is so vast and interesting – then it will become easier for people to get involved. And then want to get involved further and further.
Finally we looked at some automated Twitter accounts, otherwise known as bots. I had to make a Twitter for this but I ended up not using it and just watched the person next to me. Oops! We looked at two of Tim’s creations, TroveNewsBot and TroveBot, as well as NYPLEmoji. All three of the bots were interactive and if you send a message at them they’ll respond (and generally quite quickly too!) with content from their collections. ToveBot and TroveNewsBot both use Trove as a data source giving it an Australian perspective while NYPLEmoji uses the New York Public Library’s digital collection. The bots gave me the same sense of wonder and discovery as AnnoTate did, allowing people to explore collections on a social media platform that most are familiar with. The NYPLEmoji bot is particularly engaging and exciting as it responds in related images from the NYPL collection when tweeted at with an emoji!
I think I might want to look into something that evokes that feeling of discovery for my project. I want to make something fun that people can use as a tool to explore more and a bot might just be the way to do that.
Until next time!
Jacinta?
