THATCamp Canberra

Well, you see I have this data… and I thought you might help me do something with it…

A few months ago I created the Flickr Machine Tag Challenge. This was intended as a concrete example of how we might use machine tags (aka triple tags) to add rich semantic links between resources. In this case, the machine tags identify people in Flickr photos (or the photographers) using identifiers from the National Library of Australia’s People Australia database. There are more details on the site.

Amazingly, since I launched the site, over 1000 machine tags have been added to Flickr.

Foolishly though, when I set it up I promised that I’d build something using all this data, but I haven’t quite got around to it yet. So I thought I’d see if anyone at THATCamp was interested in a mini-buildathon, where we start to sketch out what sort of app we might create and do a bit of hacking to pull a rough demo together. Along the way you’ll learn a bit about Flickr APIs, People Australia, machine tags and the possibilities of linking biographical data.

Lise Summers – I’d like to propose a General discussion session on creating information rich catalogues.  Essentially, I’d love to be able to add something like tags to our online catalogue, in a way that retains the authority structure and links of the ‘master’ catalogue, while at the same time allowing researchers to add information about file contents, even images of pages, to the catalogue. 

The National Archives UK have a wiki page, as does PROV, but neither of these links back well to the main catalogues.  Museums are using thumbnail images of their collection as a way of enticing this sort of user content, and there is the NLA newspaper project, also imaged based.  But what if you don’t have or can’t have images?  Put it all on Wordpress and post tags?

This session is intended to discuss subversive social hacks of bureaucratic processes, particularly ones which contest or convert oppressive structures into freer ones.

My interest in this as a proposal comes from being the HERDC (formerly DEST and DEET) publications reporting officer in a large school.

Hacking HERDC publications reporting

While academics have been noting their research outputs to University management since the 1960s, in the early 1990s the Federal government began using volume of output as a measure of academic research productivity averaged at the University level.  The gate-keepers of academic research output in Australia are often librarians.  However, academic editors and conference organisers in the Humanities at least often fail to adequately prepare their authors for navigating this process.

This section of the panel notes briefly the history of output volume reporting in Australia, observes the conflicting workplace pressures created by volume reporting, directs attention to simple ways to navigate basic reporting, and gestures towards known edge-cases which indicate some of the problems of the system, and then points out that jumping these hoops can be made much easier by action in the humanities at the journal editor / conference organiser level.  Finally it notes that volume reporting appears to have been successfully introduced as an accepted part of work culture over 20 years: quality has now begun. (In under five minutes even).