Too important not to try

Opening the archives

Making a start

Some principles:

• opportunistic
• flexible
• collaborative
• open

Every story

A different kind of finding aid

Blogged

Re-blogged

Inspiration

Featured

Compared

Studied

Serendipity

Experiments with topic modelling

Topics

Looks interesting..

1 0.55539 passport ah student exemption students lee wong
chinese young deserter education sing wing chong readmission
son hing chin wife

Files found!

Tagging probate records

Harvested and parsed

Late night inspiration

The files

The people inside

A file

The people inside

Sharing

Linking

Old loves

New views

LOD love

Yay!

free and open sharing—in small, imperfect increments... helps to reinforce what I think is good practice for a digital humanities shop like ours: the framing of big ideas as small, relatively low-risk, but very public pilot projects. The potential embarrassment of any failure you encounter is, to my mind, more than offset by the potential benefit of having shared a little idea that may well succeed somewhere else.

Ridiculously ambitious,

totally unfunded,

but too important not to try.