I went to the Research Databases in the Humanities workshop, organised by Sudamih, which was an excellent afternoon and time well spent. An Oxford heavy event, there were a number of interesting directions that came out of the afternoon. Firstly James Wilson, project manager of Sudamih at Oxford University Computing Services, outlined the Database as …
Weeknotes: Arts funding, Open Correspondence
I’ve been doing some updating this week rather than anything new. I was going to spend time trying to complete the places section of the Open Correspondence website. It needs some tidying up as the endpoint has had some changes made to it. I did come across an issue which has implications in exposing other …
Searching Open Correspondence with Xapian
As part of the continuing work on Open Correspondence, I managed to install Xapian to act as a full text search engine. I’ve been looking to do this for a while and had started on working on a remote back end (as blogged here) but decided not to use it as it appears to have …
Finding the data signal in the noise
Marshall Kirkpatrick, on ReadWriteWeb, poses the question A web of infinite information: does that sound like a scary problem of “just too much”? in a “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Data Wranglers” where he discusses an interview with Evan Williams on GigaOm. (I’m not going to discuss the interview here (but …
Hacking Arts Council data
I lost my hackday cherry yesterday and went to the Open Data hackathon to look at the South East arts council data found at the data.gov.uk site (http://data.gov.uk/dataset/grants-for-the-arts-awards-arts-council-england). Our hosts, White October, were fantastic and welcoming (and put the kettle on as soon as I came in!) and Incuna provided the much needed pizzas for …
Providing an arts funding platform
A brief post but I saw this article in the print version of the Observer on All Visual Arts (AVA) this morning on a the (re)rise of private arts funding. It set me thinking. Given the supposed interest in buying arts from those who are not billionaires, could micro-funding model be applied to the arts …
Contextualising places in time
As part of the Open Correspondence project, I’ve started to look at place names and locations to build a set of temporal and spatial data for the letters to allow for geographical queries. As part of the search, I came across a reference to Sean Gillies’ useful blog post talking about modelling historical place names …
Weeknotes: Books and places for Open Correspondence
Progress on the next version of Open Correspondence has been a bit slower than I would have like. Sleep is, however, useful to being alert enough to write code. I’ve gone back to the some of the work that I was doing for the first version of the site way back last year. As part …
Digital Humanities and building data sets
Rob Myers reposted this New York Times link on the Open Knowledge Foundation discussion list about Digital Humanities and its growth. It mentions the Mapping the Republic of Letters project (unfortunately it does not appear to be open) and its linking together of the centres of letter production. Last night I managed to build the …
Weeknotes: Open Correspondence, Xapian and Linked Data
After last week’s server move, we discovered one or two things that needed to be changed before they could go live. The main thing was the Xapian search which I had been working on. The initial version kept the Xapian server on the local machine and used that to index and search the letters butt …