iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/10/2026

Yeah, nah, what I've been waiting for is all this publicly-funded data in machine-readable form with an open licence...

Screenshot of FB post from the Australian Dictionary of Biography announcing their redesigned website. The post features a photo of Bob Hawke holding a volume of the ADB.

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2026

For #oaweek I had a look at the #openaccess status of articles in 5 Australian history journals. tl;dr: 'read and publish' agreements have had a big positive impact, but too few articles are being saved in repositories […] [Original post on hcommons.social]

Screenshot from a dashboard showing a series of pie charts, bar charts and tables. The main heading is "All journals", with subheadings "Best Open Access version" and "Articles in repositories". Under "Best Open Access version" two pie charts show the percentage of articles in each open access category. The first is labelled: "1955 to 2026: 90.74% of articles are closed" and the second is labelled: "2025: 49.78% of articles are closed". Next to the pie charts are two bar charts showing the number of articles in each open access category per year. The top bar chart shows them as raw numbers, while the lower one gives them as percentages. There is a noticeable increase in OA articles from 2023 onwards.

Under the charts is a table which reads:

open access type | number of articles | percentage
closed | 9,073 | 90.74%
hybrid | 449 | 4.49%
green | 246 | 2.46%
bronze | 231 | 2.31%

Under the "Articles in repositories" is a pie chart showing that only 3.97% or articles are in repositories. next to it is a bar chart that shows the number of articles in repositories per year.

1126 12

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026

Discovered because I was trying to wrap long labels in Altair to display the fastest and slowest Federal Royal Commissions (number of days between letters patent and final report, data via Parliamentary Handbook)

Two horizontal bar charts jointly labelled "Time taken by Royal Commissions". The top chart is individually labelled "Ten slowest" and lists 10 Royal Commissions sorted by the number of days between letters patent and final report. The largest number of days is close to 1,800. The bottom chart is individually labelled "Ten fastest" and lists 10 Royal Commissions sorted by the number of days between letters patent and final report. All of these were completed within 100 days.

000 0

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

I've created aggregations by PM, and done a little analysis. Here's the number of transcripts by year and Prime Minister.

Bar chart showing the number of transcripts by year and Prime Minister. The Y axis shows the number of transcripts, ranging from 0 to more than 800. The X axis shows the year, from the 1940s to the present. The colour shows the Prime Minister. Bands of colour give an indication of how long a PM was in office. The number of transcripts per year has been steadily rising.

201 2

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

Interesting to ponder the cultural influences working on the person who constructed the Hansard Style Guide examples...

Screen capture from the Hansard Style Guide giving examples of how to refer to people with titles. The examples include: President Ed Kuepper, Secretary-General Harrison Ford, Senator Organa ,Chancellor Merkel, Colonel Harry Styles, Justice Springfield, Sister Moon, Minister Toshiro Mifune, Professor Bragg, Senators Baggins and Took, Justices Murphy and Mason, Ministers Smith and Jones, Defence Minister Brown, Finance Minister Leigh, Trade and Tourism Minister Farrell.

101 1

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/09/2026

Updating my harvest and indexing of the PMs Transcripts for the first time since about 2019. Now with ScoMo and Albo.

Bar chart showing the number of transcripts by Prime Minister and year. The Y axis shows the number of transcripts per year, ranging from zero to over 800. The X axis shows years from 1940 to 2026. The identity of the PM is shown by colour.

022 2

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

My side project for self-amusement at the moment is a minimal academic profile generator built with Zola and pulling all it's data from Zotero. It's primarily meant to make it easy for people to share green open access publications.

Screen capture of a website displaying my basic details including a photo, name, and brief bio. There's also a link to download a CSV. Underneath the bio details is a list of selected articles. The articles have green badges indicating that open access Author Accepted Manuscript versions are available and a blue button for more details.

023 3

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2026

A puppy with a tummy upset has meant a couple of very sleep-disrupted nights. Thankfully things have settled down today. Here's me and puppy at about 6am this morning...

Photograph of a 60 something man with grey hair and beard lying back on a reclining sofa in a dressing gown. On his lap close to the camera is a black Labrador puppy looking much more alert than the man.

031 3

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026

Been playing around with data from the Parliamentary Handbook today. Here's mean ages of parliamentarians at the opening of the first session of each parliament. It's been trending up for the last 20 years after a dip in 1970s-90s.

Screen capture of two charts labelled 'Age of members at the start of each parliament'. One the top is a line chart showing mean ages for each parliament. The y axis range is from 40 to 60 years. The chart goes up reaching a peak of mid-50s, then declines to 48 or below, before steadily climbing to 52 in the current parliament.

The second chart shows the same mean ages but the y axis ranges from 20 to 90 years. In the background of the line is a lightly coloured area chart that shows the extremes for each year (youngest & oldest).

112 2

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026

New puppy proof gate for our steep inside steps is under construction.

Photograph of a wooden gate propped up on a workbench. The gate is made of Tassie Oak with 7 vertical slats.

141 4

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026

Getting the hang of JupyterLab/Altair/Quarto for laying out charts nicely.

Screenshot of an series of charts from an HTML page egenerated by Quarto from a Jupyter notebook. The layout has one larger pie chart on top, with two small pie charts underneath. The combination of charts has the caption: "Figure 1: Number of parliamentarians by gender (1901 – present)", while the individual charts have their own captions: "(a) Both houses", "(b) House of Representatives", "(c) Senate".

011 1

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/08/2026

Got the Omeka-S EDTF module installed for some fuzzy date goodness. I like the way it humanises the values on display (so '1900~' becomes 'Circa 1900' in the interface). github.com/Daniel-KM/Omeka-S-module…

Screenshot from the Omeka-S admin interface showing how EDTF formatted fuzzy dates are displayed in the interface. The examples read "Circa 1900 (date is approximate)" and "Maybe 1900 (date is uncertain)".

004 4

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/08/2026

Today we choose our new puppy. We were told she's the smart one in the litter and had already figured out how to escape from the puppy prison...

Photograph of a 6 week old black Labrador puppy looking out from inside a metal fence.

162 6

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

Oooo look what arrived in the post -- a box of @hello merch!

Photo of an assortment of merchandise branded with 'Knowledge Commons' -- includes pens, stickers, lens cloths, and a notebook.

031 3

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/07/2026

I haven't been able to update the Trove Data Guide since the NLA cancelled my API access, but I've edited the static HTML code to include a new warning. tdg.glam-workbench.net/home.html

Screenshot of a 'warning' box in the Trove Data Guide, the title of the box reads: "Changes to Trove data access".

The text reads: "Since this guide was created in November 2024, Trove has added new limits on API access and has started enforcing a much stricter interpretation of its terms of use. This means you might need to negotiate an exemption to the terms of use before you can make use of the tools and examples in this guide."

112 2

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/07/2026

I was honoured to get a special award as 'most dedicated Labber' at the GLAM Labs Futures conference in Edinburgh: updates.timsherratt.org/2026/07/15/… It really meant a lot after a difficult couple of years...

Photograph of a man with grey hair and glasses holding a scientific flask in front of his face. The flask has a pink ribbon tied around it's neck and silver writing that reads 'GLAM LABS AWARD'. Inside the flask is an orange/yellow substance.

2102 10

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/07/2026

Over the past six days I've walked over 100km along the West Highlands Way in Scotland. Another 24km tomorrow and I'm done. It's been amazing. I haven't shared any photos because at the end of each day I'm spent, and I sort've wanted to make sure I could […] [Original post on hcommons.social]

Photo of Stob Dearg viewed from the Devil's Staircase section of the Great Western Way in Scotland. In the foreground are rocks and heath in the background looms the mountain, its peak covered in cloud.

3104 10

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/06/2026

Before there was AI, before there were deepfakes, there was the Vintage Face Depot. Currently working on resurrecting my circa 2015 Twitter bot for the Fedi...

Photograph of the face of a grey-haired man, except his face has been overlaid with a grainy, oval shaped image of a face from a digitised newspaper. The opacity of the newspaper face is reduced so that the two faces blend together a bit.

001 1

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/06/2026

Don't think this is bots, I think it's librarians from the wider local studies seminar today playing around with the NSW, Tas, and Vic directories on glam-databases.net

Chart of pageview stats from the past 7 days for glam-databases.net. For most of the week the pageview numbers are around 100-200 per day, but today they jumped to nearly 1,000.

121 2

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/05/2026

Working on adding some extra options and improving the performance of my Trove newspaper images userscript...

Screenshot of the Download panel in Trove's newspaper interface. There's an extra 'Download image' section added by the userscript. Previously this section just had buttons for 'Article' and 'Page', but this screenshot shows that next to the 'Article' button there is now a dropdown widget to set the scale, and a checkbox to set image masking on or off.

050 5

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/05/2026

Achievement for the day -- managed to replace the battery in my old 2015 MacBook Pro. I'd previously loaded Linux Mint, so it should now have a new life ahead of it.

Photo of part of the screen and keyboard of a 2015 13" MacBook Pro. The screen shows the MacBook is running Linux Mint, and a terminal is visible showing upower stats from the new battery. In the background are an assortment of tools and the old battery.

142 4

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/05/2026

Melbourne's Southbank – buildings from the 1950s (recorded on Mahlstedt fire insurance maps in the SLV) on a modern basemap. Maps georeferenced using IIIF and Allmaps. viewer.allmaps.org/?url=https%3A%2F…

Screen capture showing a series of georeferenced maps from the 1950s on a modern basemap. The background colour of the historic maps has been removed so that only the buildings remain.

122 2

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/05/2026

Ever wanted an easy way to save newspaper articles in Trove as high-resolution images? I've created a userscript that makes it easy to download cropped and masked articles, as well as full page images. github.com/wragge/trove-newspaper-i…

Screenshot of the Trove newspaper interface with the 'Download' side panel open. The userscript has inserted a new section in the panel headed 'Download images'. Underneath the heading are two blue buttons labelled 'Article' and 'Page'. Underneath the buttons is the thumbnail of a cropped and masked image, and a link to download it.

22219 22

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/05/2026

Working on a new userscript that adds an option to the Trove interface to download a newspaper article or page as an image. Seems to be working...

A screenshot of the Trove newspaper interface with the side download panel open. Underneath the standard "Download" options is a new heading "Download image" and a blue button titled "Article". These have been added by the userscript. Underneath the button is a thumbnail version of the cropped and masked article image and a button to download it.

182 8

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/05/2026

I call this work 'Realtime bot blocking'...

111 1

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/05/2026

Known bad bots (I think identified by user agent strings) blocked by Anubis in the last 17 hours or so.

Screenshot of tabular data listing bot names and number of times they were blocked:

bot/meta-webindexer 195331
bot/alibaba-cloud 83220
bot/huawei-cloud 708
bot/ai-catchall 6
bot/ai-crawlers-training 2
bot/ai-crawlers-search 1

111 1

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/05/2026

I've migrated my GLAM databases to a new home with AI bot defences. I have redirects in place so the old addresses will continue to work for now, but if you use any of these apps it would be a good idea to update your links/bookmarks! glam-databases.net

Screenshot of the home page of glam-databases.net. The text reads:

GLAM databases

This site hosts a number of databases associated with the GLAM Workbench and Wragge Labs. These currently include...

Directories

- NSW Post Office Directories (54 volumes from 1886 to 1950)
- Sydney Telephone Directories (44 volumes from 1926 to 1954)
- Tasmanian Post Office Directories (54 volumes from 1890 to 1948)
- Sands & McDougall's Directories, Victoria (24 volumes from 1860 to 1974)

Indexes

- GLAM Name Index Search (12 million records from 293 datasets)

001 1

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/05/2026

From the last few hours showing what happened to bandwidth usage when I switched on the redirect, and then the drop off after I blocked 'meta-webindexer'.

Chart showing bandwith usage over time. A purple line shows outgoing data and a green line shows incoming. At about 11am the purple line shoots up dramatically and remains roughly constant for an hour or so before suddenly dropping back to about 20% of the peak value.

100 1

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/05/2026

[Selfie, eye contact] New hair courtesy of Maison de @baibi

Selfie of a bloke in his 60s with grey hair nearly clippered on the sides and back and longer on top where it's swept over to one side.

000 0

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/04/2026

Archives AND time travel -- two of my favourite topics in one! Looking forward to reading this book by @lynnemthomas

Photograph of a book cover the title of the book is "The infinite loop: archives and time travel in the popular imagination". The authors are Lynne M Thomas and Katy Rawdon. The imprint at the top indicates the book is part of the "Archival Futures" series.

032 3

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/04/2026

Working on georeferencing some more of the Mahlstedt fire insurance maps of Melbourne from the SLV. Southbank is hard because almost nothing remains to align the maps with! […] [Original post on hcommons.social]

Screen capture of four georeferenced historical maps lined on a background of a modern digital basemap. The historic maps are lined up along the southern bank of the Yarra river, and show streets and buildings that no longer exist.

022 2

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/04/2026

Hee hee, the icon for 'realia' in the SLV catalogue is a little Ned Kelly helmet...

Screen capture from an entry in the SLV catalogue showing a black and white line drawing in the shape of Ned Kelly's helmet.

042 4

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/04/2026

I got a trail camera for Xmas and have finally set it up to see what goes on in the backyard at night. No big surprises so far, though I didn't know the possums were raiding the bird feeder, and the pademelons hang around for longer than I expected. Here's some pademelon fun...

132 3

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/03/2026

So that's fun – found myself as the author of a presumably AI hallucinated article, cited in a chapter of a book published last year. Didn't write it, doesn't exist. Even has a DOI that not suprisingly, goes nowhere. The chapter is on Zenodo: zenodo.org/records/15446620

Sherratt, T. (2019). From collection to connection: Trove and the community. Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association, 68(2), 133–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/24750158.2019.1593898

154 5

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/03/2026

Tripped in the dark and injured myself, but... (there was a bit of light cloud as well) #bloodmoon

Photo showing a slightly blurry image of a pinky-red moon against a dark sky

111 1

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/02/2026

Revisiting my HPS/STS past by getting a copy of this classic (reissued with an extra chapter in 2020). Still very relevant: "technical decisions are political decisions, and they involve profound choices about power, liberty, order, and justice".

Photo of red book cover. The title is "The Whale and the reactor" and the subtitle is "a search for limits in an age of high technology". The author is Langdon Winner. The cover design includes small illustrations of different technologies including oil drums, wind turbines, nuclear weapons, and solar panels.

041 4

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/02/2026

New blog post describing the interface I've built to explore digitised maps from the State Library of Victoria that have been georeferenced by the public over the past few months. updates.timsherratt.org/2026/02/12/… #GLAM #digitalHumanities #maps

Screen shot of the Georeferenced Maps Explorer. On the right is a column showing a list of georeferenced maps with metadata and thumbnails. On the left if a digital basemap centred on Wilson's Prom, on top of which four different georeferenced maps and aerial photographs have been layered, creating a digital patchwork Prom.

042 4

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/02/2026

This is also handy if you've added multiple, similar looking maps (like the photomaps) and want to check which is which!

000 0

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/02/2026

I know I said I was going to stop fiddling with the geofreferenced maps explorer, but I had a thought in the shower this morning... Now as you mouseover the results, the map boundaries are displayed.

172 7

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/02/2026

Here's 7 photomaps along the Murray from 1980 stitched together, with their opacity reduced to show the relationship with the modern basemap […] [Original post on hcommons.social]

Screenshot of my SLV georeferenced maps explorer showing 7 photomaps (like aerial photographs) arranged side by side along the Murray River in north western Victoria. Some of the maps are overlapping slightly. The opacity of the maps is reduced so some of the features and colours from the modern basemap are bleeding through. To the right of the map is a list with more details of each map.

110 1

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/02/2026

Three 1850s maps of Kyneton from the State Library of Victoria, georeferenced and layered. slv.wraggelabs.com/geomaps/?lat=-37…

Screenshot of my SLV georefrenced maps explorer showing three layered maps of Kyneton -- one large map of the electoral district, a smaller map of agricultural lands, and an even small map of the village of Kyneton. They are arranged so that the largest map is the bottom layer, and the smallest map is on top. To the right of the maps is a list showing more details of the displayed maps.

121 2

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/02/2026

Oh no Jon Kudelka... We'll remember him every day through his bees in our dining room and Flash Wally in our hallway.

Large painting by Jon Kudelka of bees around a leatherwood tree. The painting has a bright yellow background, with white flowers, green leaves, and many small bees buzzing about.

Close up of painting of bees on a leatherwood tree by Jon Kudelka showing the details of the white flowers, leaves, and chubby little oval shaped bees with tiny white wings.

Framed print of Flash Wally the wombat by Jon Kudelka. It is a black and white print of a wombat with one golden tooth.

0385 38

Tim Sherratt @wragge.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/02/2026

Getting a tour from @baibi of the new UTAS Forest building. This space is open to the public, so thinking it'd be a great space for an academically homeless person like me to work, have office hours, run small workshops, or even a THATCamp!

Photograph of the public space in the new Forest building showing the many flexible working and meeting spaces, with lots of beautiful timber, plants, and natural light.

133 3