Date set for Textcamp

The provisional date for Textcamp has been set for August 21st on the twitter feed.


Data curation in real time

Robert Scoble’s blog has this intriguing post on real-time curation which has made me think. At the moment I’m working in curating and archiving gigabytes of information at work (and usually on ways of generating more data from the systems). Whilst this is not necessarily real time, I’d like it to be or at least […]


A change to the Letters project

During the previously blogged dinner with Ben and Rufus, we talked about the nascent work on the letters project. Both have “encouraged” me (it didn’t take too much persuasion, it must be said) to move the project to the Open Knowledge Foundation and to port it to Python with a Redis backend rather than the […]


Textcamp announced

Had dinner with Rufus Pollock and Ben O’Steen on Monday in Oxford. As part of the dicussions, the notion of Textcamp was raised and Ben has created the Textcamp website with an associated blog. It is a slightly bigger concept than I had had but the approach, I think, will allow the creation of a […]


Exporting and querying Dickens data

As a follow up to the posting regarding the propsed ontology, I’ve started to try and create a SPARQL endpoint. At some point soon, I want to use the new version of ARC as the version I’ve got here is a little out of date. After that the next thing should be to allow the […]


Creating the text ontology

I’ve been working quietly on ideas for an ontology to describe relationships inĀ  a letter from the correspondent to people referred in the text. It is intended to complement and extend the Dublin Core and Foaf (Friend of a Friend) namespaces. Anyhow I’ve decided to publish a first set of thoughts on it having sat […]


Growing and using data

Just seen an article on Techcrunch by Bradford Cross of Flightcaster regarding the growth of data on the Web. He appears to argue that data and its uses will drive the Web soon, writing: the data age is less about the raw size of your data, and more about the cool stuff you can do […]


Mining data driving the web?

Just seen an article on Techcrunch by Bradford Cross of Flightcaster regarding the growth of data on the Web. He appears to argue that data and its uses will drive the Web soon, writing: the data age is less about the raw size of your data, and more about the cool stuff you can do […]


Digitising books and mumblings on open literature

Robert McCrum, an associate editor of the Observer, has this remarkably sane blog post regarding the nature of digitisation and Google Books. Perhaps it is only my interpreation but it does seem to be a slight volte face on his part, as I’ve always interpreted his stance as slightly anti-digitised books. Having read Adrian Johns’ […]


Varsity article on Open Shakespeare

I’ve just come across this Varsity article on the Open Shakespeare project which the Open Knowledge Foundation run (and I did a bit of porting of for Open Milton). I got involved in other things like the Dickens project and sidetracked that way but the original project has received a second wind.