the visible archive

So after signing the contracts at the Archives thismorning, I can declare this Day One, and the project has officially started. The contract revealed some good stuff. The project will focus, as proposed, on two levels, visualising high level structures in the entire collection (series, agencies and functions); and within an individual series. Even better, that individual series will be A1, a huge collection dating from Federation up to WWII - more than 20,000 records that occupy over 450 metres of shelf space! I understand that this series is also very highly digitised - which raises the prospect of working with not only the catalogue data, but the digitised records themselves.

Can't wait to get my hands on the data; I'll be meeting with the Archives again soon to discuss starting points, data formats, and so on.

Meantime, welcome to the brand new project blog. Your comments and thoughts are always welcome - for now I'm especially interested in related work in the visualisation of cultural datasets and digital archives. I'll be posting some of my own research in those areas soon, but if you have any pointers, send them along. Here's a short outline of the project, for starters.