Wednesday 22 February 2012

A Week in History (&Film?)

Have had a mixed week of the proverbial highs and lows, the presentation went well in Digital History I thought. Was basically about searching the British Library's newspaper database and the problems I've had. More of what Tim has mentioned previously with bad OCR resulting in random or wrong articles coming up and the lack of coverage in the provincial newspapers and how to try and get around it (see below for slides). 

Also had a major panic in the dissertation in that some of the statistics I was going to use may prove to be wrong! Will speak to my supervisor tomorrow but I may have misinterpreted either the original book I found or the new one, I'm not sure. Stay tuned on twitter etc for more breaking news (e.g. lots of blanked out swear words).

And I did a presentation in film where I cheated and got the seminar to split into two groups and come up with some answers  ... ha! It worked surprisingly well, although I did do a lot of the background reading anyway and began thinking my whole approach was wrong just before I was due to give it. Must have been nervous despite having done that kind of thing before, but it all worked out fine in the end.

Sunday 19 February 2012

Presentation from Friday

Had to convert slides via screen dumps into jpegs in Photoshop, then upload to Flickr but have hopefully added a gadget below that shows the slides from Friday. May not be trying that again (!), also had to use HTML and code to embed it as Blogger's Flickr gadget uses random pictures from your account. Would have been ok, but only used this account for a website in New Media Publishing module and wouldn't have made sense (e.g. would have flashed up other random pictures).

The picture quality could be better, but it looks good in the small size (I get a little project in my head and I have to do it sometimes!). Enjoy...?! :0)

Wednesday 15 February 2012

Presentation Week?

Have been working on dissertation and have managed to get one chapter out of the way! :0) Only two more to go...but however, onto presentations. Have managed to get ten slides or so together and feel like I know what I'm going to talk about roughly. As mentioned in twitter, I could go the route of doing some live searches but the University's servers are so slow that I think I'll have to stick to screen dumps and individual slides. Strangely, I also have a presentation to do in film for next week on The Kingdom or Riget in its original Danish form. Going back to Digital Histories, perhaps I could try a live search at the end of the presentation and get people shout out suggestions? Maybe entertaining as we watch the little circle go round? Will do some final sorting out tomorrow, if I have time and can work out how to do it I might post a version up here.  

Wednesday 8 February 2012

Presentation Plans

Was recently thinking about doing a presentation in Digital History on the British Libraries newspaper database which I have been looking at extensively over the past year/eighteen months. Although provincial coverage is not brilliant, it could still be worth investigating as many articles are picked up on in other newspapers. Thus, some news stories are still reported despite the lack of coverage. However, I think it's OCR and search engine still leave a lot to be desired as you get results with nothing to do with your key words. Link follows...

http://find.galegroup.com/bncn/
Please note; must be logged into Athens before you use this link.

Friday 3 February 2012

My First Post

Have finally managed to get round to sorting out a blog for the Digital Histories course and was hoping to have a juicy piece of information however it looks like the issue has been resolved in the intermittent year or so since I discovered this. When Internet Explorer 9 first came out I discovered a glitch in older websites whereby I would do a search in an archive in IE9 and no results would show up. However, when I did the same search in Firefox, low and behold I would get results. Just wondered if anyone else had come across this kind of problem with different browsers or strange results? Keep your wits about you, I'm sure if you look for something like incendiaries or fires in the eighteenth century at the Norfolk Archive site (admittedly as stated previously this problem has been fixed and the site revamped) something should show up rather than nothing?