THATCamp Canberra

Cemeteries are a key local studies and family history resource.  Work is being done with gps to aid in the locating of graves.  In some cases communities are assisting with recording locations.  Many libraries, archives and museums have images, information, and in some cases audio/visual recording of relevance.  It would be amazing if when walking through a cemetery you could access information/images/recordings of some of the people buried there simply by having a location aware mobile device. It would build on the often scant or cryptic information on headstones or grave markers.  Detailed information would not need to be available for every grave, but some would be a great start – and the information may be as simple as reading transcript of the text on a hard to read headstone.  It would also tie in with the with way some cemeteries are changing how they record location information for burials.   For new burials this could be a way for people or their families to provide information/images for the future.  Obviously anything done in this area would need to be respectful of the general ambiance of cemeteries.

It would mean that  image databases may need improved location information, but it would enhance  the experience of visiting cemeteries.  Ideally it would scalable so once developed it could be used in cemeteries everywhere from areas of war graves to town cemeteries and cemeteries associated with properties.  It may be that the Australian War Memorial datasets may be a way of exploring this idea.

I have not been able to find example of this yet.

This ideas was developed using crowdsourcing  with NSW public library staff.

As light relief we could use wildcards created by Richard Watson and Oliver Freeman to aid in brainstorming for ideas (not that there seems to be a shortage of ideas so far).

Web2.0 has taken hold at PROV and we are now trying to figure out ways to take our existing data and publish it in a usable form on a regular and automatic basis. The specific tasks we have in mind are:

how to extract data into xml format

design a tool that can harvest xml on a regular basis automatically

identify what is an archival standard xml and why and what are its elements

how to match our  xml elements to the archival standard xml elements and describe why the matching has occurred

design a tool that can publish xml on a regular basis automatically

Currently users access the collection here.  One day, with your help, they may be able to access it

here.

Do you dream about visualising PROV’s Archival Control Model and the holdings in engaging and innovative ways that seemlessly show the inter-relationships between Function, Agency, Series, Consignment, Unit and Item? Do you wake up each morning punching the air with the very thought of  embedding within this visualisation a way of navigating through the records?

No…neither do we. But we want to!

Team PROV (Asa and Sebastian) are coming to THATcamp armed with  XML files containing a sample of the records and their relationships to each other.  We are hoping that some of the more artistically/technically minded among you may support us in our quest to develop a ‘better way into the records’ and a ‘new way of seeing the holdings’.  At a very basic level this may mean:

“1. a timeline of agencies

2. a map of function/ agency relationships (ie functions with agencies clustered around them)

3. a ‘rhizome’ of agencies

Even if we only get a static or partial visualisation, it’s still something to build on…” (suggested by some PROV staff)

As a new Social Science archivist, although not new to social science, the problem of convincing social scientists to archive their data is a big stumbling block. There seems to be a culture of working alone and not sharing data, this culture really needs to change to make the most of the limited research resources. The archive (ASSDA) can archive a wide variety of research information including notebooks, images, video recordings, observation data as well as the statistical data. I would like to discuss with the social science community and other archivists:

1. The views of social science researchers about sharing their work and working collaboratively.

2. What it takes to convince them to archive their research.

3. What do they want from a social science archive?

Tim Sherratt and I have begun a new project called ‘Invisible Australians: Living under the White Australia Policy’, which Tim boldly announced on his blog a few weeks back. Inspired by projects such as London Lives, Mapping our Anzacs and the National Library’s Australian Newspapers, we think there’s the potential for something really very interesting to be done with the early 20th century restricted immigration records that were created because of the White Australia Policy. The records document thousands of non-white people, mostly Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Syrians and Afghans, who were living in Australia at the time.

The records include two particular forms that are rich in personal information – Form 21, Certificate Exempting from Dictation Test (CEDT) and Form 22, the application for a CEDT. They include details such as name, date of birth, birthplace, places of residence, occupation, marital status and family situation. They also feature front and side portrait photographs and handprints.

The first thing we’re planning to do is to develop a crowdsourcing tool to transcribe information from these forms – with the hope that we’ll then be able to create connections between the people in the records (e.g. matching husbands and wives, children and parents, cousins, neighbours etc), as well as creating links between different groups of records that document the life of one individual (e.g. CEDT applications and case files, alien registrations, naturalisation files, birth death and marriage records, census listings, cemetery records etc).

We’ve got some ideas for how the initial tool might work, who we’d like to participate (both as our crowdsourcing community and as institutional partners), and other records that we could, in the long-term, be working with too.

So, I’m thinking that a THATcamp conversation about this might go either of two ways. We could brainstorm ideas for the tool itself, thinking about all the nifty things that it could possibly do. Or we could talk about the idea of building a community around the project – how do we create something that people will want to contribute to and how do we reward them for their efforts?